Learn about managing grant projects.

Hello, and welcome to our impactful projects and Planning series. I'm Jami Yazdani. In today's session, we'll talk about what makes grant funded projects different from other projects. And I'll share a few key tips for managing grant projects. Grant funding is really integral to many nonprofits and other mission driven organizations. grants can provide essential financial resources that allow nonprofits to take on important and innovative projects. grants can fund pilot programs or program expansions research initiatives, or the creation of unique solutions to community problems. So what makes grant projects different from other types of projects and mission driven environments? One key difference is external accountability. Because funding is coming from an outside source, we typically must report on progress and success to the funder, which often means meeting the funders reporting requirements. Another key difference relates to fixed budgets, grants typically provide a set amount of funding over a temporary timeframe. And this is going to require you to more carefully budget plan your budgeting and track your spending and this vein be more careful than we experience with work and when we're working with donor or internal funding. grant projects sometimes also have multiple funding sources. So both internal and external, that can make budget management much more complicated. Similarly, the timeline requirements of a grant impact the timeline of our project would starting and ending dates often coming from the funder, or based on budget or reporting timelines. This can create additional pressure to meet project milestones, and deadlines. But probably the most impactful difference is in our planning timeline. Because grant funded projects often require us to create a project plan. Long before we get approval and funding for our project, we are typically planning a project well ahead of starting the project, sometimes a year or more in advance. What this means is that our project plan is often dictated by the time the project starts. And we may not take into account changes in our staffing, our capacity and our environment. A lot can happen while we wait for approval and access to grant funding that really can impact our project and our project plan. So executing on an outdated plan can really put the project manager in a challenging spot, and it does not set our project up for success. So what can we do? I've got three tips to share to help you manage grant projects. My first tip is to review and create a comprehensive project plan. What I often see folks do is just take the simple plan that they provided the funder and kick off the project based on that plan alone, you know, in their mind planning is complete. Now that we have the funding, and we need to just start executing right away. But I would really encourage folks to take a step back and create a current comprehensive project plan. We absolutely want to use the simple plan and proposal we provided the funder as a starting point for our more comprehensive plan. But we should be making additions and revisions based on our current needs and environment. I do recommend fully reviewing the funding proposal and any funding agreements to ensure you understand what you've promised the funder, the timeline, any parameters, then you can build your more comprehensive current project plan from there. I've talked about this in much more detail in past sessions. But my experience is that a focus on these five key elements throughout a project can greatly impact your project success, especially for mission driven organizations. So we want to create a comprehensive project plan that includes scope, stakeholders, deliverables, schedule and communication. The plan As we provide funders to get grant approval often require us to focus more on broader outcomes and our schedule planning, with scope and stakeholders kind of embedded throughout our proposal. A communications plan is often not required by a funder or communications are really only briefly mentioned in our proposal, or initial plan. So to create a more comprehensive project plan for our grant project, or really any project, I recommend this five step approach, we'll go through these step by step. First, confirm your project scope. So scope is what establishes our projects purpose, and is really critical to ensuring buy in and engagement from team members. Scope is usually somewhere and that grant application, but we still want to take some time to make sure it's understood. And ideally that we can express it in one clear sentence, not pages and pages that we may have used in a grant application. Now next, you want to identify your project stakeholders and define their roles. So for grant project stakeholders were likely defined, but they may have changed since your initial plan. And so we do want to spend some time confirming who our stakeholders are, and then really delving into the roles that they are going to play. Next plan for communication. So Good communication is so important to project success. So communication planning is really, really critical. I'll talk more about communication in my next two tips. But it is something that we want to do, we want to create a communications plan that is going to reflect those stakeholders and roles and our current environment, then you can define your project deliverables. Now, these are often also part of your project proposal, but sometimes they are quite broadly defined in your in your grant, or funding proposal. So we probably are going to want to spend some time defining much more specific tangible deliverables. So for example, you may have told your funder you develop a new project for a user group, but what will you actually create? So is it an assessment of user needs and a program outline? Are you creating all of the materials or resources needed to deliver the program? Are you running a pilot or an initial cohort, we want to clearly define these tangible deliverables. And it really is that deliverables planning that can lead us to planning for other areas that will impact your project like quality measures. Deliverables also leads us to task planning, and this is determining who will do what activities and tasks driving the actions of our project. Then you can set a detailed schedule, creating deadlines and milestones to set expectations and monitor progress. Of course, you want to start with any schedule you provided to your funder. But you can use those key milestones to build out a much more detailed schedule with tasks but also with communication points.

My second tip is to carefully plan for funder communication. So when we plan project communication, we want to consider all of the ways that we will communicate within and about our project. We may be used to planning communications with our project team and organizational leadership. And we may also have experienced planning project communications with stakeholders in our community. But we also want to plan for communicating with our funder. I often use a who, what, how and when approach to planning project communications. So who needs to know what about our project? And how and when will they know it? If our funder is a who what do they need to know about the project often this includes status and funding reports. But it may also include reports on deliverables or assessments or outcomes or feedback from stakeholders. Once we know the what we can identify the how, and so do these reports need to be uploaded to a grant management system or portal email to a contact at the funder presented at a meeting with the how we can plan for the when setting deadlines for creating these communications. Planning for these funder communications early means that you aren't scrambling last minute to meet these requirements. It shouldn't be an additional thing on top of your your project work it should really be a part of the process. direct communication planning is also a great time to make sure you know who your contacts are at the funding organization. My experience with foundations is that the best contact after a grant has been awarded may be different than the contact you had during the application and approval process. There may be a new team of folks in charge of managing grantees. So you want to make sure you know who your audience really is. Related to funder communication. My third tip is to align your project reporting with your fundic funders reporting requirements. So when we are managing grant projects, our funders sometimes have formats they want us to use when delivering reports. They may have a progress status form or a budget spreadsheet that we need to use. But we often also need to provide similar information and reports within our organizations to our leadership or community or to the finance folks. Regardless of the type of project I'm a huge fan of preparing and using templates for common communications from reminders, emails, and meeting agendas to reports. Using templates can Save Project Managers a lot of time. Unless your organization requires that every project always use the exact same templates. And those templates aren't very flexible. I recommend basing your internal reports on the format's required by your funder, so don't reinvent the wheel. Don't waste time creating two versions of a report covering the same content unless it is absolutely necessary. So try to use the same or at least a very similar format for other reports and communications throughout the project. To do this, you're going to need to understand which reports your funder requires as early as possible in project planning. Creating this alignment during project planning long before that first report is due to your funder or if your leadership can really save you time later in the project. So those are a few quick tips for managing grant projects. Don't just rely on the simple and perhaps outdated plan you submitted to get grant funding. Review that plan and create a comprehensive project plan based on it. Be sure to plan carefully for the who, what how and when of communicating with your funder, and align your internal project reporting and communications with the reports required by your funder. Before I take questions. I want to encourage you to download our communication planning worksheet to help with the who, what how and when of project communication planning. This free download of our simple worksheet is a great start to communication planning, and is available at YazdaniConsulting.com/resources. On that same resources page. You'll also find a link to a webinar I did for instrumental on five key strategies to improve your projects for grant success. This free webinar is great if you'd like a deeper dive into some of these topics. So if you need more hands on support, leading and planning your grant projects, do reach out or visit our project solutions page at YazdaniConsulting.com/projects to learn about our services. Great. So I'm happy to take any questions you have about managing grant projects, please add them in the comments due to the streaming delay. I'll give folks a few moments to add their questions. If I cannot answer your question live, I'm happy to respond later in the comments. You can find all of the ways to contact me at Yazdani consulting.com contact, please reach out to me if you'd like to chat about grant projects. Okay. So a question is, once you get into planning, what if you realize the approved plan is pretty far from what is now needed or possible. So if you've realized that you need to make some pretty significant changes to the plan that was approved by your funder, so you know, maybe your deliverables are different, your timeline needs to be longer, you're going to need to deliver those deliverables in a different order. Maybe you need to shift how you're going to be spending the funding, you really should reach out to the funder right away. Don't wait until that first progress report is due. I would say that to do that, you know, let them know of course you're grateful for their support. But as you've started creating this really detailed plan and kicked off the project, it's become clear that things have shifted and so then you can share that new plan with them and see how they respond. And my experience has been that foundations and other funders are sometimes very willing to compromise with you and they understand that things have changed since you wrote the grant proposal. They want your project to be successful. So share what needs to change for that success to happen. Okay, so I'm not seeing any additional questions. Do feel free to comment or reach out and message me if you do have questions I can answer thank you for participating in our impactful projects and Planning series. Visit YazdaniConsulting.com/IPP to view all of the sessions in this series and learn about upcoming sessions. There won't be a session in August, but I plan to be back in September. Thank you