December 14, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Grant Winner’s Toolkit: Project Management and Evaluation
by James Aaron Quick and Cheryl Carter New
Grant makers are becoming increasingly focused on whether their donations make the difference they intended, say the authors of this book.
In this environment of accountability, write James Aaron Quick and Cheryl Carter New, nonprofit managers are under a great deal of pressure not only to raise funds for their projects, but also to flawlessly execute them once the funds have been secured. Mr. Quick and Ms. New explain that they designed this guide to help nonprofit managers successfully carry out such projects and ensure that they will grants in the future.
The book is divided into three sections. In the first, Mr. Quick and Ms. New explain that good grants management starts with the grant-seeking process, before an organization has even submitted its proposal. They advocate a team-oriented grant-seeking plan with well-defined goals, and describe in detail how to design a program and develop its budget.
In the second section, they cover the basics of project management, offer tips on documenting how grant money is spent, and present guidelines for administering project events and finances.
The book’s final section lists a variety of methods that nonprofit managers can use to evaluate their projects. Explaining that project assessments can improve an organization’s overall performance, they outline how to create and distribute evaluation reports and offer advice on how to communicate with grant makers to determine whether a project should be continued, terminated, or simply modified.
The guidebook is accompanied by an I.B.M.-compatible disk that contains forms, checklists, timesheets, and exercises that managers can modify to meet their organizations’ needs.
Mr. Quick is chief executive officer of Polaris Corporation, a fund-raising consulting company in Inman, S.C., and Ms. New is Polaris’s president.
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 1 Wiley Drive, Somerset, N.J. 08875; (800) 225-5945; fax (732) 302-2300 or (800) 597-3299; http://www.wiley.com; 371 pages; $39.95; I.S.B.N. 0-471-33245-3.
