Tools for Grant Organization & Clarity

This spring, ORDE offered a seminar on Grant Writing Structure and Mechanics, and heard from Ritu Chopra, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Paraprofessional Research and Resource Center in our School of Education and Human Development.  The center is completely grant funded, and as its leader Dr. Chopra spends much of her time on grant development.

As part of her presentation, she offered up a couple of tools she uses to both organize her projects and to clearly communicate to grant reviewers. These are an Index of Priorities and a Logic Model.

Index of Priorities
Dr. Chopra began including an index of priorities in her grants to the Department of Education to explicitly show where in her grant proposal she was addressing each of the sponsor's priorities. She and her team would comb through the entire RFP, identifying all of the priorities and items that the sponsor was asking for and then outline those in a table of priorities. Under each priority, she would identify exactly where in the proposal (page number/section) her team had addressed it. This tool made it easy and clear for reviewers to see exactly where and how the center had responded to each of the things that were important to the sponsor.

Note: If you're thinking about using an index of priorities, make sure that your sponsor/RFP allows its inclusion in your grant.


Logic Model
Another tool that Dr. Chopra recommended was a logic model. A logic model is quite simply a table that identifies the following:

• inputs: resources that will go into a project
• activities: tasks that will take place in the project
• outputs: direct results of the activities
• outcomes: the benefits realized from the activities
• impact: the broader effects of particular project activities

Below is a simple illustration of the logic model components from the Pell Institute's Evaluation Toolkit

These logic models can serve to help your team clarify and develop your project, but can also communicate clearly to a sponsor what you will be doing in your project and the implications for your project.

Use the resources below to learn more about using logic models and to see examples.

Resources:
Program Development and Evaluation - University of Wisconsin Extension
Evaluation Toolkit - The Pell Institute
The Evaluation Center University of Colorado Denver