Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Teresa Huff, and I'm a professional grant writer and development consultant. Are you trying to learn Grant writing but feeling a little overwhelmed by all the different components? Why does everyone want to know your goals and objectives? What's the difference between Goldson objectives anyway? And why does it really matter? I've been writing them for years, and it's not that hard once you get the hang of it. This course is perfect for beginners and grand writers with some experience who want to refine their skills visibly helpful, whether you're on staff or if you're a freelance grant writer, we'll share with you my easy formula for making sure you don't miss any important factors When you're writing your goals and objectives. By the end of this class, you'll be able to define what it is you're trying to dio outline the clear steps you need to take to get there and how you'll know when you've gotten there. Be sure to follow my channel to access the whole grant writing Siri's as it's published. If you're looking for more in depth mentoring on any of these grant writing topics, head to Theresa have dot com and let's talk. Invest a few minutes in yourself today so you can then change your world. Ready. Let's roll
2. Goals and Objectives: What's the Difference?: First, we need to understand the difference between a goal and an objective. Think of it like the make and model of a car. If I say he drives a Chevy, every single one of you watching this is going to picture a different Chevy vehicle. If I say he drives a 2016 blue Chevy Silverado 1500 double cab, now we're getting somewhere. Everyone's pretty much on the same page. Your goals and objectives are sort of like the make and model of a car. Goals. Paint a broad picture of what you want to achieve. Objectives. Tell the who, what, when, where, why and how you'll reach that goal. Objectives give you a way to measure how close you came to reaching your goal. Objectives need to be smart. This is a common acronym, but it works, and it's easy to remember. They should first be specific and measure only one thing. If you read your objective and find that you have two or three or more things in your objective, break it down. That's not one objective. You need to go back and pull out and make an objective for each thing in your list or re evaluate. Do I really need to measure this many things that brings us to measurable? You need a way to quantify the goal. Will this be test scores? Attendance, Improved program quality? There could be many different ways to measure it, but make sure that you have somehow that you can show a difference from beginning to end of when you implement achievable means. Can you reasonably reach this goal? Is it realistic expectation, which is the next one? Realistic? Is this goal actually achievable? Stretch yourself. That's the point of a goal. But don't set yourself or your organization up for failure with unrealistic expectations, either. And then finally, time framed, make a commitment and put a deadline on that thing. Quick challenge question for you. What does smart objectives stand for it? Can you run through the list?
3. Why Use Goals and Objectives in Grants?: Why do we use goals and objectives in grants? Not having goals and objectives in your grant is sort of like saying he drives a car. Um, great. So do millions of other people. When you say he drives a Chevy truck, at least that narrows it down to one general category. Then you can keep narrowing down more with details. Why are funders so big on goals and objectives? Anyway? I could throw out all kinds of cliche sayings like, If you don't know where you're going, you'll never know when you get there. All those are true, of course, and that's why there are plenty of books on goal setting. When it comes to grants, though, there's another perspective to consider. Thes funders are making an investment in each organization they fund when they're considering which application to award. They're looking for the greatest return on investment, the R O I, and that's where they will put their money. Your goals and objectives are a key method to showing them there are a why why should they invest in you because they'll achieve fill in the blank with the money in your own words? What's the difference between goals and objectives? Why were they such a big deal in grant applications
4. When and Where to Use Goals and Objectives?: When should you use golden objectives in grant applications, and how do you know where to include them? The request for proposal or the RFP will tell you where to include thes. Read the RFP guidelines carefully to be sure you understand where they go in the application. Usually goals and objectives will go in your project design section, or you might see it in the evaluation section. Either way, the goals and objectives should directly go along with the reasons you're asking for grant money. They should show the progress you plan to make because of the grant and how you're going to measure that progress, so everything across your entire application should align.
5. Formula for Writing Goals and Objectives: at the beginning of the course, I promised you an easy formula for writing Goldson objectives. Well, here we go. It's easy to get caught up in the weeds of writing goals and objectives. After a while, everything runs together, and you can't tell if they're clear or not. Did you remember to cover everything? Does it make sense? Well, here's a quick formula to help you for your goal. You're just going to state. What's the one big thing you want to achieve? That's it. Just stick with one broad thing that you want to see happen by the end. This program for your objective. There are several steps to include. This is where you get into the details of how you're going to reach that goal. Here is the formula for writing objectives, so you're gonna plug in the blanks with appropriate names or descriptions. This agency will implement this program with these consumers to achieve this behavioral change, increase, decrease or maintain blank by this amount for this period of time, and that's it. You just plug in the blanks with the information and you'll include everything you need. You can rearrange this formula to make sense for each project or to be grammatically correct, but this gives you a good checklist to make sure you didn't miss any important pieces of your objective. Funders will be looking, and they will notice if you leave something out. So follow these steps. Run through the checklist and you'll have it just like you need for your challenge. Drop down this Formula one. It'll help you start thinking through the steps, and two, it will help you to have it clear and written down right beside you when it's your turn to practice writing objectives.
6. Examples of Goals and Objectives: up to now, we've talked about the concept of goals and objectives, and that's great. But now it's time to get some actual examples, so you can see first hand what I mean and start thinking through how to write them yourself . Remember, goals need to be high quality and broad what you're going to achieve with the full program . Here's an example. X Y Z project will reduce the rate of homeless teens in our county. Now the objective is what you aim to accomplish. By 2020 the center will create a 24 hour hotline so the number of homeless teens in Greene County will decrease by 20% from the previous year. And there you go. That's it. We just keep refining until we make sure we have all the details we need. And we don't have too many details, either. If you're measuring several things, you need to break it down and just measure one thing per objective. So, for example, the goal of ABC Youth Program is to provide free activities for the town's Children and teens to keep them safe and off the streets during non school hours. Now, here are a couple of objectives that might go along with that goal. You tell me which one is better. Here's the 1st 1 Students at ABC School will improve their spelling scores because of this grant. Here's the 2nd 1 By May of 2020 25 1st grade students at ABC School will increase their spelling scores by 25% as measured by weekly classroom tests. Which one of those objectives is better? If you said the 2nd 1 you're correct, it's got more details. It's smart, remember specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time framed. So we went through the list. We included all those steps. It tells exactly who, what, when, where, why and how is going to happen with this objective. Here's 1/3 example for you. Tell me what you think of this objective. By May 20 21st and second grade students at ABC School will increase their spelling and maths scores by 25% as measured by weekly classroom tests. Okay, think about that for a minute. Let's look at that one. What's the matter with it? Remember what I said about it needs toe only have one thing that you're measuring. So this has a couple of problems. First of all, you've got first and second grade students. You're measuring two different age groups, and you're also measuring your spelling and your mouth scores. So really, you could break this down into four objectives. One for first grade math, first grade spelling, another two for second grade math and second grade spelling, so it might feel a little redundant. But those could all have very different results from your program, and you need to have a way to measure each set of those results to break down the data and show the effectiveness. Maybe a certain spelling curriculum is working great, but your math curriculum is a little weak. You can't measure that of its all lumped together, and the funders want to see that, too. So break it down One thing at a time.
7. Get Your Hands Dirty - Practice and Course Project: all right, so by now we've talked enough about theories behind goals and objectives. Now it's time to actually work on some really life examples together. See what you can do to make the school better. If my goal is, I want to be a better runner. Um, that's pretty vague. Doesn't tell me much. It doesn't really say better Runner, Am I comparing myself to someone on the couch or to someone in the Olympics? So let's try again. I want to run a five K by the end of this summer. Okay, that's a lot more specific of a goal, but it still brought enough to be a goal. Now let's take it a step further and create an objective. How can we make this objective better? I will run a five K in record time. What does that really mean? Whose record? What kind of record? Now, I'm not a very fast runner, so my record time is gonna be a lot slower than someone else's, so don't judge here, but let's see what we can do with that objective. I will run the summer smash five K to decrease my personal time toe less than 30 minutes by the end of August. Okay, now we know where I'm going to run, How far I'm going to run my goal for the time and a definite time frame for getting the gold done. If you go through the formula checklist, make sure we've accounted for all those items. Now the elements don't have to be in the same order like we said before, rearrange, so it makes sense. But make sure you have those things in there to where it's specific. Now we have the separate goal, which is more broad, and we have the objective that tells what we're gonna do, how we're going to do it and how will know that we did it. So that's how you do it. And it's the same way. If you're applying it to your running or your grant writing, you just take your broad goal, make sure it's defined, and then you take your objectives. You go through step by step to make sure you've accounted for how you'll know when you've reached that goal. Keep practicing and you'll get the hang of this in no time. Okay, your turn in the course project you're going to write your own personal goal and objectives ready? Let's give it a try. First of all, review the goals and objectives formula. You can download the template middle class resource is section. Make a copy of that template for yourself so you can use it for reference. Now choose one small goal for yourself. This could be something you'd like to accomplish just in the next few days. Maybe organize your desk. Jog around the block without stopping just one small goal. Use the formula to write down that goal. Make sure it's specific enough, but still kind of broad. Now you're going to develop two or three objectives for how you're going to reach that goal and how you'll know when you reached it. Keep in mind you don't have to follow the exact order of the formula. Just include everything in a way that makes sense. Now review your goals and objectives that you wrote, is the goal abroad achievement and are the objectives smart, specific, measurable, achievable, reasonable and time framed. Post your goal and objectives in the community, then get to work and achieve that goal and share a picture of your success with us just for fun. Now remember, these can apply to grant writing as well. So right now you're just learning the process. You're just getting comfortable with writing Golson objectives on something that's simple. You just have to think about setting the goal and the objectives of how you're going to do it. So once you've learned the process of writing the goals and objectives, then you can apply it to something a little more challenging, like a grant project. Right now, just focus on learning the process and getting comfortable with the steps to where they become more and more automatic. Then you'll be a pro in no time.
8. Conclusion and Next Steps: now you should be able to tell the difference between goals and objectives. Understand why they're so important to grant funders, have a clear formula for writing them and be able to clearly define your own goals and objectives. Your next steps are to review your notes from the course, complete the course project and share it with the community. Follow me on skill share. Leave a quick review and, as always, go make an impact. I'd love to hear your goals and objectives. Now what are you working on today? Where you stuck? Shoot me. An email info it. Theresa have dot com and let's talk. Let me know how you're making a difference in your community. It would really help me out if you could take a quick 30 seconds to review the course and let others know how it's helping you. Please follow my channel to hear about more courses coming up in the series. Thank you for watching and go change your world
Teresa Huff, Equipping you to change the world
