Applicants should pay special attention if donors require answers to specific questions. The project summary is a fairly straightforward component of the concept note. However, it is important to include the relevant information clearly and succinctly so that donors can easily read and evaluate your project.
Focus on your project, not your organization. At the concept note stage, donors are only looking to see if your project is of interest to them. At a later stage, donors will conduct further due diligence procedures, but that information is not necessary for the concept note. Try to include only one or two short sentences regarding your organizational background.
The rest donors can glean from your website or by meeting with you. Include specific and general location. Geography is very relevant in donor applications, so make sure you provide specifics even if it seems obvious. If you would regionally, make sure you clearly define those boundaries. It is also important to define if you are working in rural, suburban, or urban areas as well as working locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally. Copy the language of the donor. Donors have their own goals and priorities in their grant-giving, and you need to make sure they understand how your organization fits in those goals.
If a donor publishes their exact evaluation criteria, use those criteria as headings so the donor can easily find what they are looking for in your concept note. This is a small step, but clearly demonstrates to the donor that you have done your research and paid attention to all the small details.
While the importance of your project may seem obvious to you, this is not always the case for the donor. Proposal writers often get caught up in the details and numbers of their project and forget the overarching reason for the project to exist.
Do not make this mistake in your concept note. Donors receive hundreds if not thousands of proposals , and they want to read applications that are important and clearly show the problem they are solving. Take this time to explain to the donor how you will impact the lives of your beneficiaries , and what the costs will be if the project does not take place.
It is useful here to combine personal stories of the community members you hope to help as well as relevant statistics to show the scale of the problem. This section of the concept note does not have to be long, but it does have to be clear and engaging. Even a single well-written sentence that clearly proves the necessity of your project can place you above your peers in the application process. This section is often short- perhaps only one or two sentences long. However, a concept note cannot be effective if this section is not properly written out.
The Call to Action is what you want your readers to do after reading your concept note. Convincing your reader to complete this call is the entire point of the concept note. Good examples of calls to action include:. Typically, the purpose of a concept note is to get the donor interested enough in your project to contact you and ask for the full proposal. The project summary and why the project matters section should motivate the readers, the call to action should convince the readers to contact you, and the contact section should tell your readers how to contact you.
This section is fairly straightforward, but some concept notes make the mistake of providing either too few or too many modes of communication. Including too few contact options makes it difficult for donors to contact you.
For example, if you only include a telephone number but the donor needs to mail you a letter, then that is a problem. Similarly, if you accidentally mistyped your telephone number and did not provide an alternate form of contact, then the donor will never be able to reach you.
Conversely, providing too many options can be confusing to the donor and risky for you. For example, if you provide 10 possible contact methods, you will have to check all 10 regularly or risk missing the important message you were waiting for. Including too many sites also risks the donor contacting you in ways you cannot control.
If a donor decides to send you a message via an account you do not check regularly or that is entirely run by a volunteer intern that could potentially damage your credibility with the donor.
In general, the modes of contact you include should match the ones you check regularly and the modes the donor checks regularly. We give you a Concept Note template with a purpose to give grassroots NGOs a better idea of what to include in a concept note to convince the donor to get your amazing projects funded.
It is uncommon that donors have a format for a Concept Note as they have for a full proposal. But always keep in mind that few donors might have their own templates and specific guidelines.
Want to read a full sample concept note next? Alta Alonzi is a writer and researcher focusing on international development funding and grassroots NGOs. She works with the fundraising consulting company Philantropia conducting research for clients ranging from small NGOs to UN organizations. She also works closely with FundsforNGOs running training webinars, contributing resource guides, and updating the Premium donor database. However, for those binding constraints that the selected country wishes to pursue, it should expect to identify a number of problems that contribute to the binding constraint through the analysis of root causes as described in Chapter 6.
MCC encourages the selected country to prioritize the one or two as core problems that contribute most heavily to the binding constraint and demonstrate the greatest potential for being resolved or addressed through a compact program. In cases where the constraints analysis identifies cross-cutting issues or where two or more of the binding constraints to economic growth are very closely intertwined, the selected country may also identify core problems that address more than one constraint simultaneously.
In addition to these sources, the Compact Development Team is also encouraged to reach out to economic planning and development specialists, academics, researchers, sector specialists, private companies, consultants and international development agencies to collect data, reports, assessments and other information that will help shed light on similar experiences in other countries, lessons learned from prior efforts to address the problem, international best practices, and any other project work that is ongoing or planned for implementation in the near future.
These sources of information should allow the Compact Development Team to define a core problem that drives or contributes heavily to a particular binding constraint to economic growth, and to define a broad strategic approach that will address the root causes and resolve the core problem.
The information should also allow the Compact Development Team to articulate a clear primary objective that it expects to achieve by resolving the core problem, including how the objective will stimulate economic growth and reduce poverty. In drafting its Concept Notes, the Compact Development Team should take care to present the required information in the template for Concept Notes, in form and substance similar to the template attached below.
Concept Notes should be written in a concise manner that focuses squarely on the argumentation, information and data that MCC requests without a substantial amount of additional information.
To ensure that MCC is able to undertake its own review and assessment efficiently, each Concept Note should be between five 5 to ten 10 standard pages. Many private donor agencies ask for a concept paper to be submitted for review prior to the submission of a full proposal. The materials are primarily targeted at local government officials, but are considered equally useful for individuals and organisations that work with local governments in the management of water resources.
This is the third in a series of guidelines prepared by REPOA in order to help researchers prepare improved proposals for research. Funds forNGOs. The subject of this short course is proposal writing. Let your search flow Search. What is a perspective? Executive Summary A concept note is a summary of a proposal containing a brief description of the idea of the project and the objectives to be pursued. Concept papers help donor assess whether or not the proposed project is aligned with its funding priorities and enables them to offer suggestions to the applicant before the submission of a full proposal.
As a concept note is much shorter than a full project proposal, less time and resources are needed to prepare a full project proposal. The preparation of concept notes costs time and money, and only in specific cases the project idea will fit a call of proposals. Financing programs requesting concept notes for the first step of the selection process usually demand documents with a number of pages and words, which are not enough to communicate the project idea, making the preparation of a concept note a challenge for the participants.
Concept notes are generally binding documents submitted to donor agencies. After a participant has been invited to submit a full proposal, usually the aim of the project should be kept for the second step.
However, the most you will research and prepare the document, you will find that the idea could be changed and even improved, but it might not be accepted by the selection committee. Introduction Factsheet Block Body. Stay up to date about water entrepreneurship! Want to stay informed? Subscribe to the SSWM newsletter!
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