Learning from Failure CARE’s Analysis of Why We Lose

Why analyze Failure? CARE 11/18/2018 We submit about $500M in proposal in a given year. With about a 35-45% win rate, there is always room for improvement. But beyond that, every NGO spends a lot of effort applying for USG competitive bids. And like any business, we need to be the best at convincing the donor that our approach is better than the other 45 applicants. And when we do it convincingly, the donor gives us the money to do good in the world. When we lose, we have to shut down good programs, fire staff that work on those programs and scale back how many people we serve in a country. So please sympathize with your new business people. They have a lot on their heads, what with losing millions of dollars for the organization and potentially making people lose their jobs and our assistance. No pressure. So to sleep better at night, the new business shop at CARE decided we needed to find out what we were doing wrong and fix it so that we could keep doing the work we do and do it better. We started by looking at loss letters from USAID, when we were lucky enough to get them. CARE 11/18/2018

How did we analyze Failure? AAR Loss Letter But as you may know, the donor does not always send a detailed response to why your proposal was rejected. Loss letters from USAID are also not consistent from department to department and often left us with more questions than answers. So we added some other steps to triangulate why we lose. We developed a survey with about 60 questions that spanned the proposal development process and asked all stakeholders in the process about each aspect of proposal development, from forming the right partnerships to developing the most cost effective budget. We sent these out to anyone who had intimate knowledge of what made this proposal a winner or a loser: which includes country office staff, HQ technical staff, partner organization staff, consultant. When we did not get a detailed loss letter, we followed up directly with the donor to request a in-person or phone debrief. About 50% of the time, we would have these calls where the donor essentially goes through the proposal and tells you what deficiencies and strengths it had. This kind of feedback is invaluable and gives you real insight into how they make decisions. It’s like NBD gold! Debrief CARE 11/18/2018

How do you analyze Failure? We triangulated this information and categorized comments from the donor into broad categories. These categories vary, depending on what major areas we found to be deficient year to year. But they could include things like “weak technical strategy” or “weak partnerships”. We further broke these categories down so that within technical strategy, you could have “weak integration or weak link between TOC and activities” A bit of tallying up and analysis overlayed with the comments on each proposal by the AAR, and voila, we have a picture of why we lose. CARE 11/18/2018

What Did We Find? I’m telling you a lot about CARE here, but the analysis pointed to some themes for why we lose competitive proposals. These areas are probably similar for many organizations, but what this told us, along with our qualitative analysis, is what we needed to focus on to design better programs and write better proposals. And it wasn’t just about how we sold what we did. It made us think about whether we even had the right people in the room. CARE 11/18/2018

RMUs, COs, Technical Units, EMT Who Did we Tell? We were very honest with sharing what we found. I wrote a paper every two years summarizing the results of our analysis of why we lose. It was about a 10-15 page paper that laid out in detail why our win rate was 35% or 45%, and what we could do to make it better. And we sent this paper and even the raw data to everyone at CARE. It went to regional management units, country offices, HQ technical staff and even the executive management team. Basically anyone who had a stake in increasing our win rate with our USG competitive bids….which are our bread and butter, so that’s everyone. RMUs, COs, Technical Units, EMT CARE 11/18/2018

Better Planning Leads to Better Results What Did We Do? As a new business shop, it wasn’t just about telling others what we could do. It was about taking a good hard look at what we doing. So we examined all of our processes, from the lead time we had to develop partnerships before a solicitation was released to the number of recruiters we had on deck to handle busy bid season. It took several years to staff up the team and to redefine how we worked. But what we ended up with was an 18 month process that was more streamlined, well thought out and in the end resulted in the development of better programs, because we were giving ourselves the time and resources to do it. Better Planning Leads to Better Results CARE 11/18/2018

What Did We Learn? HOW TO WIN! CARE 11/18/2018 And the results were significant. Since we started writing why we lose in 2008, we went from submitting $80M/year to now about $500M/year. A lot of this was attributed to increasing sizes of grants and CARE getting back into food aid. But we were also better equipped to go after this level of funding and importantly to win more of it. HOW TO WIN! CARE 11/18/2018