Are you designing a program – or reshaping an idea to fit a grant?
Can you explain why your program should work?
If someone funded you tomorrow, could you deliver it?
Susan works for a small community organisation. On Monday, someone forwards her a grant opportunity:
“This looks perfect for us. Could we apply?”
The deadline is in three weeks.
By Friday, Susan is designing a program, building a budget and writing the application at the same time. Budget_FINAL_v6_reallyfinal.xlsx has entered the chat.
Sound familiar?
The problem isn’t that Susan is bad at grants. Funding readiness starts well before the grant opens.
Good program design starts with the problem, not the grant.
It’s tempting to read the funding priorities, highlight the keywords and bend an idea until it becomes sufficiently grant-shaped.
What if you start somewhere else: the problem.
Say Susan’s organisation wants to improve young people’s engagement with support services.
What is happening? Young people are regularly missing appointments.
Who is experiencing it? Everyone, or particular groups?
Why? Transport? Appointment times? Distrust of services?
What do we know? What are the organisation’s data, staff and the young people themselves saying?
Only then should Susan ask: what should we do?
For example, good-practice guidance from the Australian Institute of Family Studies recommends beginning program planning with the problem and then connecting activities to the outcomes you expect to achieve.
You’ve probably also heard of a theory of change.
No, it doesn’t mean locking everyone in a room with butcher’s paper, sticky notes and seventeen arrows.
It simply means explaining why what you do should lead to the change you want to see.
If transport is the barrier, another information session probably isn’t the answer.
That’s theory of change in action.
Where does the program fit?
Susan also needs to ask where this proposed program fits within the organisation’s wider work.
If every funding opportunity produces a completely different project, target group and set of outcomes, the organisation may eventually find itself managing a collection of funded activities rather than pursuing a coherent program strategy.
Strong programs don’t need to be identical, but they should make sense together. They should reflect what the organisation exists to do, what it understands and what it can realistically deliver.
Otherwise, Susan isn’t finding funding for the organisation’s work. She’s repeatedly redesigning the organisation around whatever funding happens to be available.
“We know this is needed”
That matters. But funders also need to understand: why this response?
Evidence might come from research, service data, previous evaluations and what people using the service tell you.
The intended outcome also needs to be concrete. If Susan writes that “young people will feel more connected to support,” what would that look like?
More appointments kept? Greater confidence navigating services? More successful referrals?
If you can’t explain what change would look like, measuring it later is going to be difficult.
The UK Government’s Magenta Book recommends planning evaluation early and alongside program design. Baseline information and outcome measures are much easier to collect if you think about them before the program starts.
Evaluation isn’t a task for Future Susan the week the final report is due.
Congratulations. Your application was successful.
Great. Now what?
What will the program genuinely cost? Who will deliver it? How will you measure whether it works? What happens when the funding ends?
And be realistic about the first one.
A $50,000 program that actually costs $68,000 to deliver isn’t a $50,000 program. It’s an organisational subsidy with a grant attached.
The Australian Government’s Commonwealth Grants guidance also recommends developing evaluation strategies during the design phase, including performance measures and data sources.
Being fundable is different from being good at grant writing.
It means having a clear, evidence-informed and deliverable program before the countdown starts.
Then Susan isn’t inventing a program to fit a grant. She’s finding funding for a program worth delivering.
