Assessing Your Organization

To better assess your organization's readiness to take on a development project, one of your first undertakings should be to clearly define your purpose. Being able to clearly describe your mission, identity, goals and needs will help you to define your projects, create a prospectus (a fundraising tool), and to possibly obtain funding.

Forcing yourself to document reasons for undertaking a development project might lead to important realizations about your work. At any rate, you will be ready to answer potential funders' toughest questions.

If multiple people, organizations and businesses are participating in the project, have all parties answer the same questions in order to synthesize and unify everyone's motivations, visions and goals.

Catherine R. Brown, William B. Fleissig and William R. Morrish contributed to the content of this section.