Pressing health, social, educational and/or environmental issues exist in your community, and you want to help address them. You may wonder, “How can I design a project that will be successful and convince a donor to fund it?” Here we provide you with some tools to help you design and plan projects. If you think through your project at the planning stage, writing your proposal will be easy
What is a needs assessment?
A needs assessment often forms the basis of project idea. It helps to identify the needs of the community or focus population and helps in the design and development of a strategy to address those needs appropriately. By consulting people in your community, you will know if others share the need that you perceive.
Logical Framework Analysis for Project Planning: Logical framework analysis (LFA) is the best-known tool for planning and managing development projects. BOND (British Overseas NGOs for Development) is the United Kingdom's broadest network of voluntary organisations working in international development. BOND has published an excellent paper on Logical Framework Analysis that can get you started. This paper explains why to use it, where and how. It shows how to do an LFA in three stages. You can download the paper here.
A very good guide to Logical Framework Analysis is the one produced by Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), available for download here in English, French and Spanish.
Participatory Planning
Participatory project planning allows you to involve the community or people you are trying to help in the process of planning the project's activities. Please check back to this page. We will soon have some participatory tools that can help you engage project participants in the planning process
Decision Tree Analysis: Decision Trees are excellent tools for helping you to choose between several courses of action. They provide a highly effective structure within which you can lay out options and investigate the possible outcomes of choosing those options. They also help you to form a balanced picture of the risks and rewards associated with each possible course of action. A Short and clear step-by-step guide from Mindtools (http://www.mindtools.com/dectree.html).
If you have good tips, experiences to tools to share about successful project planning, please share them with us by writing to info@susiladharma.org