#210 Proposal Writing in Small Organisations

Proposal writing, project delivery, compliance and the human impact

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In this episode I’m joined by Chiara Liguori to talk about Erasmus+ from the perspective of small organisations, where a “team” can mean two paid staff and a group of volunteers. Chiara’s career started in a Brussels-based youth NGO working on Erasmus+ with just a Secretary General, herself and sometimes an intern, plus a group of volunteers. We talk about the capacity challenge: long, technical forms, a parallel universe of jargon, and a programme that often assumes internal systems and trained staff that tiny NGOs simply don’t have. Chiara shares how she learnt proposal writing on the job – from googling basic terms and taking trainings to using previous grants as templates – and what it feels like to be the person slowly taking over full responsibility for drafting an entire application.

We then move into the funded side of Erasmus+: balancing project delivery with administrative compliance when the same person who runs a workshop in the morning uploads all the evidence in the afternoon. Chiara walks through the simple tools that made a huge difference - a big, colour-coded office calendar and a live Excel sheet linking each work package to concrete activities, dates and metrics - and how treating compliance as a habit instead of a once-a-year scramble helped protect institutional memory when people moved on. Finally, we discuss the human impact: late nights, stacked deadlines, volunteers and staff juggling other jobs, the risk of burnout, and the emotional weight of knowing that if something goes wrong, you’re not disappointing a faceless department but real people you care about. At the same time, we talk about what keeps people in this space: mission, community and the very real skills and confidence you gain from wearing multiple hats.

Time codes:

01:41 Introduction

03:59 Fly in

05:14 The capacity challenge

13:59 The proposals

28:17 The projects

43:16 The human impact

55:08 Advice

56:59 The toughest challenge