Freelance Writing and Research

Are you required to seek someone to undertake an evaluation of a project that you have been working on e.g. a community based support group for wormen, because the project and its funding are coming to an end? Don't fret, what follows is a simple model of such a document that should be adaptable to whatever your project may be. Who will undertake your project evaluation? Sometimes people will approach their local university who will have the necessary research expertise; to see whether they will undertake an evaluation - if you only have a small budget then the best approach is to put the project out for tender so that independent consultants also have the opportunity to bid on the project. The project might be advertised in the local paper or on the local council's website or sent out to a prospective group of people who would be interested in bidding on your project. What your document should contian The brief should open with a clear statement of the purpose of the evaluation e.g.: Women together is a community project that has run from September 2006 until the present date. The purpose of the evaluation is to identify the impact that lottery funding has had

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Some government funded projects require those involved to fund someone to undertake an evaluation of that project and come up with some strategies for aspects of the project to continue once funding has ceased. Some project managers however have had no experience of this kind of thing and don't know how such a document should be put together or what it should contain.

Yesterday my colleagues and I met with a client who required such an evaluation but who had no idea how to go about putting the information together for people to bid on. We had a brainstorming session and delineated some of the aspects of a typical project evaluation so that they could put together a document that we could bid on. This is the background to the short white paper that follows.

Some government funded progects stipulate that towards the end of the project the project manager should use a stated amount of money to fund an evaluation of the project with possible recommended strategies for when the project funding ends. As a rule the project manager would put together a document which outlined what they wanted evaluated and often by what means - this document would then be put into the public domain so that interested parties could bid for the owrk.

Yesterday I attended a meeting with some clients who needed to have an evaluation carried out but they had no idea how such a document was put together. So we did some brainstorming and identified some issues and possible means of evaluation which gave them the basis for their document - once that is done then  my colleagues and I will be invited to bid for it. What this meeting demonstrated was that not all project managers know what is needed for an evaluation nor how that should be used to put the evalusation up for tender. The next post is a short white paper on what such a document might contain - the company and process used are purely fictitious.

Are You a Procrastinator?

If you are a writer then there will inevitably be times when you think you have writer's block or you are finding it hard to get started on a particular project. It seems easier somehow to tidy your desk or check the emails and while you are about any chat sites that you belong to. One thing that is difficult for many writers is to know just how to structure their day. When there is no recognizable structure to anything it is easy to feel overwhelmed by work and by life in general. This is the problem for many procrastinators. They haven't identified what is important to them, what is urgent and what can be left until tomorrow - so they waste more time trying to escape what they see as an overpowering amount of work instead of sorting out their priorities.

Writers Must Manage Themselves

When we go out to work we often have a boss or manager to whom we are responsible - when we work for ourselves then we are the only person we are responsible to. We try to meet our deadlines because we enjoy what we are doing, want to earn some money and want to keep our clients - but there is no-one around to crack the whip when we veer off course. It is up to us to pull ourselves in line and to get on with what we should be doing.

The only cure I have found for procrastination is to identify my motivations for doing something. Motivations spring from feelings and unless we are intune with our own motivations and feelings then we can't identify what is important to us. Thus we find ourselves either dealing with urgent things that are not important to us and are only urgent because we have left them undone for so long. The first step in managing yourself as a writer is to know yourself and your motivations. Then you will begin to stop procrastinating and get on with what you really want to do - why else would you be a writer?