Information
Financial sustainability refers the ability of a proposal to continue its activities after Project lifetime. In the recent years, most of the grant programmes started to give more importance to having an impact of their programme even after the funded projects are ended. Financial sustainability can be achieved through different ways (Bell etal., 2010).
Your project can receive support from the government, local administration, a private company, a NGO with resources etc.. So, when you are creating your consortium, it may be beneficial to choose partners which can support your project and/or its activities even after the end of the Project.
Another way that you can continue the Project activities may be creating, designing a sustainable structure during the implementation. This structure may include development and sale of a product / service / membership, creation of a social enterprise / initiative, a continuous campaign to collect donations (or establishing a NGO for this matter).
You need to state clearly in your proposal how you are going to finance the core aspects of your Project. So, you can have necessary partners to fund the activities and/or you can create a structure for sustainability in terms of finance. While you are stating the methodology in your proposal, it should be realistic and convincing. If you are going to take a support from a partner or one of your stakeholders outside your consortium, it can be convincing that you made a meeting and reached an agreement. If it is possible you can annex this agreement to your proposal, if not you can state how, when and what kind of resources will be provided by which party.
In the same manner, it is important to elaborate what kind of income structure you will create to maintain funding for the Project activities. You need to provide detail about how you generate, collect and manage funds. The most important aspect here is to be realistic. You can made some comparisons with the similar projects. You can justify the needs that you are going to meet and demand to the services / products that you will generate.
So the main guiding question for the financial sustainability and possible answers are summarized as follows (Bell etal., 2010):
