Every organization needs funds to survive, and potentially thrive. A function to support this need is business development which leads organizations to mobilize resources almost daily, from various sources and often in competition with others for the little funding available. This has made organizations prefer technical, managerial, and evaluation staff who among others have skills to contribute to proposal development.
Here are the 12 most important issues monitoring and evaluation specialists must look out for when reviewing donor grant Requests for Applications (RFAs) or Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) for emergency or development activities. These issues will help you understand, plan for, and design better monitoring and evaluation strategy and processes for the proposed project.
The 12 issues focus organization’s ability to design a competitive proposal, monitoring and evaluation requirements in the solicitation, and appropriate monitoring and evaluation approaches that should match with the technical and operational requirements of the proposed project. The specific issues include:
- Capacity, and monitoring and evaluation roles.
- Formats and templates to use.
- Monitoring and evaluation plan.
- Program theory/logic model.
- Indicators.
- Monitoring and evaluation budget.
- Background and context information justifying the problem.
- Activity objectives and frameworks to align to.
- Target of change activity/project interventions.
- Partnerships, and partnering on monitoring and evaluation.
- Donor’s expressed review process.
- Quality and consistency in the solicitation document.
For details about these 12 Tips, check out the Monitoring and Evaluation Boost Podcast.
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