The grants I submitted weren’t approved. Now what?

Today I want to share an answer to one of the questions I most frequently get from NGOs.

QUESTION: The grants I submitted weren’t approved. Now what?

ANSWER: Here’s the thing, donors get many more proposals than they can fund, and that means that the average NGO gets only 20-40% of its proposals accepted (this varies a lot if you are submitting proposals mostly to open calls for proposals vs. to warm relationships). All this to say: don’t be disheartened! It’s part of the journey. The keys are to:

1.     Follow up if you don’t hear back. Last year, after chasing one funder with a follow up email, a form submission AND a call, it turned out our submission went to an inbox no one checks. After that, quite quickly the foundation’s president reviewed and approved our proposal!

2.     Ask for feedback. Not all funders are open to giving feedback (usually due to limited bandwidth) but unless they explicitly say they won’t give feedback, ask for it! This is a powerful way to learn why your proposals are getting rejected. One NGO I support asked for feedback to each declined proposal for one year and was able to get feedback from 3 funders. Guess what? All 3 funders told us the same thing: they received other proposals for similar programs that reach more participants and have greater scalability. So they re-worked how the organization presented the depth vs. breadth of its programs and its place-based approach to scale and the “yes’s” started rolling in (and the team exceeded its grants target by $150,000 the next year!). 

Want a done-for-you email you can use to ask for this feedback? I’m sharing, for FREE, the email I use… it has worked magic for countless NGOs. Just click here!

You’ve got this! Your action steps now are to ask for feedback and then listen.

(Image by stockking on Freepik)