Step 3: Generating direction with high quality proposals

You are setup and ready to go, and now all you need is great proposals! Where do they come from?

A successful funding round is defined by whether you can generate relevant, high quality proposals that will help your group achieve its objective(s). As you will see -- once you get started -- this is not as easy as it seems.

What a 'high-quality' proposal looks like depends on your organization and the context. You may be using looking to fund strategic and/or operational tasks with your participatory proposal process. Depending on this objective, this means your group will need to generate proposals that range from high-level strategic actions to simple day-to-day tasks.

Proposals do not just come out of nowhere, they emerge from interactions and conversations between members of your organization, about ideas, problems that need solving and opportunities to develop.

If a tool like Cobudget itself and a proposal comment function were the only ways for people to interact around such a budgeting process, one's ability to generate good proposals would be very limited. Why? Because high quality proposals are often the result of more than one brain working on it, together, and having gone through multiple feedback and adaptation cycles.

Check out this section for some concrete tactics on how to do this.

Tactics & Methods for generating direction