Capacity-building request

What is being requested

A grant of $2,400 for one place on the Comet Academy nonprofit cohort, covering up to three members of staff from this organisation. The cohort runs for three weeks from 9 February 2027 and is limited to eight organisations.

This is a one-off cost. There is no licence, subscription or renewal attached to it, and no further payment is required to keep using what is produced.

The problem this addresses

[FILL IN: describe the administrative task, and the hours it takes each month.]

Small organisations carry administrative work that software could do, but the software is sold per user per month. At that price it is either unaffordable or it consumes restricted funds that were raised for programme delivery. The work therefore stays manual, and staff time that was funded for programme goes to administration instead.

What the grant produces

• A working internal tool, deployed and in use by the end of the three weeks.
• The source code and the running configuration, owned outright by the organisation.
• Written plain-language notes describing what the tool does and how to maintain it.
• Three members of staff who have built it together and can each explain it.

Why this is capacity building

The grant does not buy a service that stops when the money runs out. It increases what the organisation can do for itself, and it leaves behind an asset the organisation owns.

The distinction matters for reporting: at the end of the funding period there is a durable tool and trained staff, not a subscription that must be renewed from the next grant.

Sustainability after the funding period

• No recurring licence fee. Running costs are the organisation's own hosting, typically a few dollars a month, and are capped before the tool goes live.
• The source and the written notes are retained by the organisation, so a future member of staff or a volunteer developer can maintain it.
• Three staff attend rather than one. A tool that only one person understands is a liability, and small teams lose tools when that person leaves.

Data protection

No beneficiary, client or donor records are used during the programme. Participants build against synthetic records that behave like real ones.

The final week covers what must be true before the tool handles anything real: where data is stored, who can reach it, what is retained, and what the board and any funder need to be told. The organisation is expected to complete that assessment before the tool goes into live use.

Risks and how they are managed

• The trained member of staff leaves — three staff attend, and the written notes are a required deliverable rather than an optional one.
• The tool is not finished in three weeks — the project is scoped in the first week to fit, and participants keep everything built plus the session recordings, with access to the following cohort at no further cost.
• The tool produces a wrong result — the final week defines where the tool must stop and a person must decide. Tools that draft or flag are not permitted to send or delete on their own.
• The need changes — because the organisation owns the source, the tool can be altered rather than replaced.

How success will be measured

[FILL IN: state the hours per month currently spent on this task, taken from your own records, and the figure you will compare against after three months.]

Do not use an estimate supplied by the provider. Use your own baseline. A funder can ask how the figure was arrived at, and the answer has to be yours.

Budget

The hosting figure is an estimate at the scale one small organisation reaches, not a quote. A spending cap and a billing alert are set before anything goes live.