After toiling away over each word of a proposal and submitting it to a foundation, a charity may receive simply a form-letter rejection—if it hears back at all. Comprehensive feedback accompanying a rejected grant proposal can be hard to come by.
Some grant makers would like to change this.
A few years ago, when Dave Moss was involved with the Slingshot Fund, a giving circle of young Jewish people that supports work often ignored by traditional Jewish philanthropies, the group received 50 applications for 10 grants of $50,000. Historically, the Slingshot Fund had given little feedback to organizations it did not support. But Mr. Moss, a fourth-generation philanthropist, knew many of the leaders of the rejected organizations and felt sympathy for them.
“I couldn’t really stomach giving them a boilerplate letter and not explaining,” he says. “I wanted to give better feedback to the folks I was turning down.” So he and several others called the 40 groups that did not receive a grant and explained why.
Understanding that without thoughtful criticism, it can be tough for a small nonprofit to improve, Mr. Moss took this concept a step further. In 2015, he created the Unfunded List to help small grant seekers who haven’t yet found the money they need.
Here’s how it works: He encourages start-up nonprofits that have had their grant proposals rejected by major foundations to submit them for review. His team of about 30 volunteer evaluators, many of whom currently work for foundations, critiques the proposals using the matrix below. After all evaluations are complete, Mr. Moss distributes a list of the most promising organizations among his network, promotes the list online, and suggests other foundations that might be likely to support the projects. In some cases, Mr. Moss and the evaluators end up personally supporting the projects financially as well.
The proposals come in wildly different formats, but Mr. Moss wanted his evaluators to have a standardized tool to review any grant proposal. In the form he developed, criteria are weighted, with the components Mr. Moss considers the most important receiving more points.
For example, whether an organization is aware of competing groups working in its field and whether it has built strong relationships to help accomplish its goals carry more weight than whether the proposal is free of spelling or grammatical errors. And though evaluators assign points (on a scale of 1 to 3) for each question on the form, Mr. Moss doesn’t intend for proposals to be ranked solely by their scores.
“I want this to be a quantitative tool that leads to qualitative discussion,” he says. He encourages evaluators to read the proposal, score it, and add notes in response to each question. He also notifies nonprofits of reviewers who are willing to speak further with applicants.
“For an organization that has been rejected, this can serve as a quick guide to the kinds of things that prospective funders may be thinking about when they’re looking at your proposal,” says Russ Finkelstein, a senior adviser with the Talent Philanthropy Project and a volunteer evaluator for the Unfunded List.
Charities can use this form on their own to evaluate their grant proposals before sending them. It may be a challenge to think critically about your own proposals when you’re so close to the work you’re doing, but having a standardized tool like this can help.
