What This Covers
This page is for program, grants and finance staff who arrive with a job to do and no page in mind. The award lifecycle has three broad phases: applying for and being selected for funding, formalizing and starting the award, and post-award implementation through final reporting and closeout. For many awards the lifecycle formally ends only when closeout is complete, including a review of your final financial and technical reports. Each line below links to the pages that help at that stage.
Start Here
Pick the line that matches what you are doing this week.
- Designing a new project. Run a needs assessment, work through problem analysis, build a theory of change, and use do no harm analysis to spot ways assistance can make a conflict worse.
- Writing a proposal. Help with the concept note, narrative, budget and logframe, written to persuade a funder rather than merely describe the project.
- Starting a signed award. Help with turning the agreement into something you can track: the compliance tracker how-to and the obligations prompt.
- Reporting and closing out. Using AI for donor reports, the donor report playbook, and the close-out and early termination checklist.
- Facing a funding cut. First steps after a termination notice ends an award before its scheduled date, and stop-work orders and terminations.
- Getting the basics right. Board duties, employees versus contractors and safeguarding.
Key Concepts
- Logframe. A table of program activities, short-term outputs, medium-term outcomes and a long-term goal, showing how each level leads to the next.
- Direct costs. Costs tied clearly to one activity, such as a trainer's salary and room hire.
- Indirect costs. General costs that keep the organization running but are hard to pin on one project, such as head office rent, the audit fee and central finance or HR.
- Cost recovery. The ways an organization makes sure all its costs of delivering funded projects are recouped.
- Safeguarding. Your responsibility to make sure staff, operations and programs do no harm to children and at-risk adults, including through program design.
- PSEAH. The sector term for measures that protect people from sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment by an organization's own staff and associated personnel.
- Board of directors. The governing body ultimately responsible for a nonprofit, with duties of care, loyalty and obedience.
- Conflict of interest. When economic interest, family or emotional ties, or another shared interest compromise impartial work.
Starting Points
AI for This Topic
An AI assistant can help you draft and edit text. For a specific task, see using AI for donor reports.
The one rule: never paste confidential project data, internal budgets or personal information into an AI tool, and check anything it says about requirements against the actual documents from your funder before you rely on it.