Building Blocks for a Solid Proposal Budget

Hosted by the Alliance of Arizona Nonprofits

Date: August 18, 2011
Time: 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Location: Catholic Diocese of Phoenix
400 E. Monroe, Phoenix, AZ  85004

Worthy grant proposals often don’t make it to the final cut because the proposal budget is poorly put together. However, crafting a budget that clearly and accurately reflects all the resources your program needs can help convince prospective funders that your project is worthy of their financial investment. 

Building a strong proposal budget is not a complex or mysterious process!  

In this workshop, you'll learn:

• The principles of mission-driven budgeting.
• How to apply those principles using a real-life scenarios as you build a detailed proposal budget, step by step.
• How to use the Grantseeker’s Power Tool – Master Budget Planning Checklist and Worksheet.
• Explore how grantmakers evaluate budgets and what your budget says about your organization.

My Takeaways:

Again, the learning and experiential objectives for this workshop say it all. This was a tiny refresher course for the Financial Management course I somehow managed to blunder through, but this went in-depth a little bit more.

• Be familiar with the major budget categories and know what is typically included in each
• Know how to calculate dollar values for common budget expense items
• Be familiar with resources for more information on developing federal grant budgets
• Understand and be able to apply the concepts of "direct" and "indirect" costs
• Understand and be able to apply the concepts of "matching" and "in-kind" resources
• Learn additional resources for building program budgets for various kinds of grant requests

To be honest, I never was good at math and though the presenter was very good, I know that I'm going to have to recruit a board member or a volunteer with an extensive financial background. It was still a little confusing, but very informative.