For most of my consulting career, I tracked donor proposals in spreadsheets.
Folders.
Slack threads.
Occasional voice notes I forgot to name.

I always met the deadlines, but the cost was high:

Context-switching.
Late-night rewrites.
“Final_v6_real” files.
Worst of all, missed patterns.

I wasn’t drowning in the work but in untracked expectations, in invisible deadlines, in stakeholder assumptions that no one had mapped.

I’ve worked with major donors, such as USAID, the UN, IDB, and International Corporations. Each proposal brought its own templates, but no one ever sent me a system.

So I built one.

Not a masterplan, not an app.

Just three modular tools I use on every project now:

📁 A Proposal Tracker that handles capture → submission without chaos
🗺 A Stakeholder Map that tracks influence, interest, and alignment
📊 A MEL Matrix that doesn’t collapse at reporting time

I keep them in Notion, I duplicate them per project, and I work alone — by design.

I share them now because they’ve made the difference between keeping up and staying ahead.

Not every consultant needs a team.
But every consultant needs a system.

I publish tools and reflections anonymously at backchannel.gumroad.co m and https://fieldstrategist.substack.com/

You can follow me on X: @fieldstrategist

Stakeholder Alignment Isn’t a Workshop. It’s a Workflow.

What I’ve used privately for a decade, I’m now sharing — because the field is shifting.

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