Top Reasons Your Proposal Wasn’t Funded

Reasons Your Grant Proposal May Not Have Resulted in Funding

Here are some of the top reasons I’ve observed for grant proposals not leading to awarded grants, based on my experience, feedback from potential funders, and collaboration with colleagues over the years:

• The grant proposal talks about a project or cause that is not really of interest to the foundation.
• The grant proposal is all about the organization and not about the cause, the need, or the people that the organization serves, etc.
• The foundation has specific submission guidelines, but the grant proposal does not follow those guidelines (e.g. too long, missed the deadline, etc.).
• The organization asks for an amount of money that is not within the range that the foundation typically gives.
• There are math errors in the proposal budget.
• The proposal budget features items that are not described in the proposal narrative.
• The grant proposal asks for a type of support (e.g. a building project, and endowment gift) that the foundation does not support.
• The foundation board is not funding a certain type of project or a certain cause during this grant cycle (e.g. applying at a different time of year, or before a different board meeting, might have had a different result).
• The foundation’s interests have shifted; the board is simply interested in different things right now.
• The foundation is only funding its current or previous grantees right now; they are not funding new grantees.
• There is missing information, e.g. the foundation asks grantees to include an audited financial statement, a board list, etc. and the organization does not submit those items.
• The foundation does not accept unsolicited proposals, and the organization sent in an unsolicited proposal anyway. (See my blog post, No Unsolicited Proposals, for ideas on how to overcome this hurdle).
• The organization was not able to touch base with anyone who works at the foundation before submitting the proposal, so they didn’t get any tips on what the board will get excited about, things to emphasize or de-emphasize, etc.
• The foundation received substantially more proposals than they could fund.
• The grant proposal is poorly written; anything from bad grammar to endlessly long paragraphs to confusing and conflicting information… the list goes on.
• The foundation has made a lot of multi-year commitments and is focused on paying those out, rather than funding new projects.
• Major national or international events (e.g. COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, natural disasters, etc.) have shifted the foundation’s short-term giving priorities.
• The organization had a bad relationship with another foundation – foundation officers talk to one another.
• A smaller organization has asked for a huge amount of money, and the foundation has doubts about the organization’s ability to handle the grant and carry out both the activities and the fiduciary management and reporting.
• The foundation prefers to give to specific projects, but the grant proposal asks for general operating support.
• The grant proposal is just…. boring.
• The grant proposal talks about the cause, and talks about the project, but it does not explain what the organization actually will DO, e.g. if the organization is proposing a series of women’s empowerment circles, what will happen at those circle events? What will the women say, do, or create? What will they experience? How often will the circles take place? How many people will be involved? How will you recruit participants? The proposal needs to go into the nuts and bolts of how the program will work, and it should paint a picture of what the experience will look like.
• The organization offers up assertions in the proposal narrative without data or citations to back them up.
• The grant proposal was submitted through an online portal, but there was a technical glitch and the foundation never received it.
• The foundation has a series of questions that they want potential grantees to answer, but the organization did not answer all of the questions.

As you can see from this list, sometimes proposals do not get funded for reasons that are entirely out of the organization’s hands. But sometimes, organizations make mistakes that can be remedied with a little extra attention and care.

Don’t expect a home run every time, but make sure your “at bat” is as strong as possible.