The Creative Project
8
Planning When Are You Going To Do It
Overview
In this chapter, you learn how to…
- List the fundamental requirements of grant timelines
- Identify best practices for formatting timelines
- Construct a timeline that reflect details and logistics to support your project narrative
In this chapter you will build your project timeline. The timeline helps you develop realistic expectations for yourself and your project partners and allows grant committees to evaluate how thoroughly you have conceptualized your project.
This can feel overwhelming at first. Keep in mind that these documents simply tell the story of your project from a different perspective. Along with providing clarity to the fiscal needs and requirements of your project, funders want to understand how you will go about developing your project over the course of the grant period or grant cycle. Your project timeline is the tool that provides a 30,000-foot view of your logistical plans to the reader of your project description–from the moment funding arrives to the moment you share your work with the world. The timeline is an opportunity to outline the necessary steps of your project and convince the granting organization that your project has a viable execution plan.
Creating a Project Timeline
At this point you’ve developed your budget and the ability to tell the story of your project through numbers. Now it’s time to share with the grant panel how you plan to make your project happen by creating a project timeline.
Every large project needs a detailed plan for you to know if it is on track. In less organized instances, this can look like a pile of sticky notes or scribbles in notebooks and scraps of paper. We’ve all been there, and sometimes a little disorganized brainstorming can be the first step in ideating what your project will look like. But as you seek funding, you need to translate that data into an organized and informative format to convince a granting organization of project success. Let’s talk about a different approach that helps you organize your project into manageable steps and increase the likelihood that your funder says “yes” to the proposal.
Most grants have a grant cycle or grant period in which the funds they award must be used. A project timeline creates a structure for you to outline and break down the necessary tasks for your project to be successful within that time frame. Timelines also help you develop realistic expectations for yourself and your project partners, including those who are responsible for different pieces in a collaborative project.
Last, the timeline helps grant committees evaluate how thoroughly you have conceived of your project and whether you have the critical thinking and planning skills to execute it successfully. Have you ever used the “I just wing it” approach? Yeah, let’s ditch that and map things out a bit more concretely.
Artists in Action
“You can run into some really insane obstacles sometimes, you know. B