What Problem Do We Want to Address?
Many organizations, companies, and government departments focus on major issues to improve their performance. They set higher standards, hire people with very high qualifications, offer training courses, and do anything to improve capacity in their teams. Those are obviously good interventions. However, there are many minor points that will still be missing and may need a small piece of advice only. We would like to offer free (for participants) webinars for professionals to help them identify those small matters that can be game-changers in their organizations. To understand more, let’s go through a few case studies:
Too Many RFPs and How to Select the Best Ones
Company A has great implementation capacity in construction and a hard-working team in their business development unit. They submit many proposals, and yet the number of successful proposals is low, and the external consultant they hired to find out what was going wrong identified that some of their previously submitted (unsuccessful) proposals were missing key requirements or not providing the right strength that the company possessed. What to do next?
There is no easy answer to this case, but for the client that we were working with and we made this case study from that experience, they are overloading their business development team by selecting too many RFPs to bid for.
In one of our first webinars, we will touch on the strategies to review RFPs and decide which ones to select for bidding and which ones to drop. This is a small but important skill that needs different levels of an organization to be involved. It can be additional support for those attending the Proposal Writing Training.
Monitoring Ethics
A successful local NGO has several projects and has met its obligations in every contract to happily satisfy its donors and stakeholders. They are facing a concern that the level of staff turnover is increasing and that too many good staff have already resigned. One matter that many of the staff members mentioned in their exit interviews was that monitoring sounded like inspection and prosecution.
While the organization has standard data collection tools, trained monitoring personnel, and follows a specific data collection matrix, the field data collection monitors do not have a specific protocol on data collection ethics and do not have an internal supervisory checklist to find out what performance gaps they show.
Using Project Contents for PR Activities
A company has many successful projects and a strong track record of on-time, quality project completion. Their projects submit all due reports, and relevant media for reports on time and with the right quality. However, their small public relations team (PR) keeps using internet content or hiring content writers who can write updates for them. Their portfolio page on their website has many photos of their projects but is not rich in text content, and there is a clear gap between the quality of their work on the ground and the content on their website. Their PR team is missing how to use data generated from routine business work as content for their website.
Project Data Management
A local NGO offers quality health services that have been always appreciated by their beneficiaries and enjoy good reviews from their donors. In some cases, there are requests for ad-hoc and special reports, but they struggle to get the project data from their field offices and clinics. This is related to project management rather than technical Health Management Information System (HMIS). A review by an external consultant reveals that field staff at clinics and field offices do not have a proper mechanism for project-related data management and assume that their responsibility is limited to technical data. The skill of project management among technical staff is helpful, and organizations do not have to send them to sophisticated training programs but give them a brief introduction through short webinars or conferences.
What We Expect From Webinar Speakers
Every year we will make a schedule with tentative dates. Pre-qualified speakers will submit their expressions of interest for relevant webinars at the beginning of the year. Four months before the tentative date, speakers will be invited to submit their presentations. In one month, their presentations will be reviewed and approved. After that, we will promote the webinar and invite interested individuals. During the month prior to the webinar, speakers will have a brief rehearsal with the moderator. This will last for about one hour. On the day of the webinar conduction, the speaker (s) will start with their introduction and facilitate their relevant session. Webinar speakers will get a stipend from Accord Worldwide. However, our aim is to help our community share knowledge and contribute to a better world.
