How to secure grant funding: the work that happens before the proposal

Organisations that win grants consistently are rarely the ones with the best writers. They are the ones that were eligible, credible and ready on the day a call opened — and that had usually been talking to the funder long before it did. Writing matters, and it is covered in how to write a grant proposal that gets funded. This guide is about everything around the document, which is where most applications are actually lost.

Most applications fail on fit, not on quality

Reviewers screen before they score. An application that falls outside the eligible countries, the eligible organisation type, the thematic priority or the budget band is removed administratively — no one reads the problem statement, and no amount of writing skill rescues it. The same is true of a missing registration certificate or an unsigned declaration.

Before anything else, extract the call’s hard filters and check yourself against them honestly:

• Who may apply — national NGO, international NGO, university, private company, consortium only, or government entity.
• Where — eligible countries, and whether legal registration in the country of implementation is required.
• How long you must have existed — many funders set a minimum operating history, often two or three years with audited accounts to match.
• Size — minimum and maximum grant value, and any rule that a grant cannot exceed a proportion of your annual turnover. This one quietly excludes small organisations from large grants.
• Co-financing — whether you must bring a share of the cost yourself, in cash or in kind, and what counts as evidence of it.
• Theme — whether your work sits inside the stated priority, rather than being adjacent to it and argued into place.

If you fail a hard filter, the useful response is not to apply anyway. It is to apply as a partner to an organisation that passes, or to fix the gap before the next round.

Map funders before you need the money

Searching for money when you are short of it produces bad applications against poorly matched calls. A funding pipeline is built in advance, and it is a research task rather than a writing one. For each funder worth pursuing, record what they fund, the countries they cover, their typical grant size, whether they accept unsolicited concepts, and when their calls historically open.

Grant funding comes from distinct pools, and they behave differently:

• Bilateral donors and their agencies — large, procedural, slow, often requiring co-financing and a strong audit trail.
• UN agencies — a mix of grants and partnership agreements; many require registration and a capacity assessment before you can receive funds at all.
• Development banks and vertical funds — climate, health and education funds with their own accreditation rules, sometimes reachable only through an accredited intermediary.
• Private foundations — faster and more flexible, frequently invitation-led, and won through relationships rather than open competition.
• Corporate and CSR funds — smaller, tied to the company’s locations or business interests, and often the most realistic first grant for a young organisation.

Calls appear in more places than any single list captures: funder websites, national aid portals, embassy pages and aggregators. Watching them is a continuous job, which is why setting up alerts against your themes and countries beats checking sites by hand. Open calls we hold are on the grants and funding page.

Get your organisation fundable — the due-diligence pack

This is the most neglected step and the most common late-stage killer. Funders increasingly assess the organisation before they release money, and applicants who have won on merit are still dropped here because they cannot produce documents within the deadline given. Assemble the pack once, keep it current, and store it where the whole team can reach it:

• Registration certificate and constitution or statutes
• Tax registration, and tax-exemption status where relevant
• Audited financial statements, usually for the last two or three years
• Organisation chart, and CVs for key staff
• Bank details with a bank-issued confirmation letter
• Board list and governance documents
• Written policies: financial management and procurement, anti-fraud and anti-corruption, conflict of interest, safeguarding and protection from sexual exploitation and abuse, child protection, data protection, and increasingly environmental and inclusion policies
• Insurance certificates, and proof of statutory compliance for staff
• References from previous funders, with contract values and dates

Two points are worth stressing. A policy has to be adopted, dated and signed — a document downloaded the week of the assessment is visible as such. And your accounting system must be able to report by project and by budget line, because a funder that cannot see how its money was spent separately from everyone else’s will not give you more.

Decide whether to apply at all

Applications are expensive. A serious proposal consumes senior staff time, partner negotiation and often travel, and the money is spent whether or not you win. Treat the decision as deliberately as a bid/no-bid decision on a tender, and ask:

1. Do we pass every hard eligibility filter, without argument?
2. Is this work we already do, or a new direction we are inventing to fit the money? Chasing funds outside your competence is how organisations lose focus and then lose the grant at implementation.
3. Do we know who else is likely to apply, and why we would be chosen over them?
4. Can we deliver at this budget, including the costs the funder will not pay?
5. If we win, do we have the staff to start on the required date?
6. What is the realistic probability, and what does an application cost us?

Deciding not to apply is a legitimate outcome. Two strong applications beat six rushed ones, and funders remember weak submissions.

Position before the call opens

By the time a competitive call is published, the funder has usually spent months designing it — consulting, scoping the problem, sometimes running a market or partner survey. Organisations that engaged during that period are not receiving secret information; they simply understand what the funder is trying to buy, and it shows in their proposal.

• Read the funder’s country strategy and results framework, and use their language for your outcomes.
• Respond to requests for information, partner surveys and market-sounding exercises — these are open invitations to be visible.
• Register on the funder’s partner portal or supplier database early; some assessments take weeks and cannot be completed inside a call window.
• Meet programme staff at coordination meetings, clusters and sector working groups. In humanitarian and development settings these forums are where funders learn who actually delivers.
• Publish something — an evaluation, a lessons-learned note, a dataset. Evidence of reflective practice is disproportionately persuasive.

Once a call is live, contact rules tighten and questions must usually go through a written clarification channel, with answers published to all applicants. Use it: a well-framed question can clarify an ambiguity that would otherwise cost you marks, and it costs nothing.

Two-stage calls: the concept note is a different document

Many funders screen with a short concept note before inviting full proposals. The mistake is to write a compressed version of the full proposal. A concept note is judged on relevance and credibility, not on operational detail, and it must answer four questions quickly: what problem, what change, why us, roughly how much.

Two consequences follow. Keep the design flexible enough that you can develop it at full-proposal stage without contradicting the concept — the two are compared. And do not spend the full-proposal budget of effort at concept stage; the shortlisting decision rarely rewards it.

Lead, partner, or stay downstream

Consortium applications are the norm for larger grants, and the choice of role is strategic rather than a matter of pride. Leading brings visibility, overhead recovery and control — along with contractual liability for partners’ spending and reporting. Being a partner brings funding and track record with a fraction of the compliance burden.

• Agree roles, budget shares and decision-making in writing before submission, not after award. A short partnership agreement or memorandum covering budget split, reporting lines, intellectual property and what happens if a partner underperforms prevents most disputes.
• Check whether the funder requires partners to pass their own due diligence — if so, start it immediately.
• Do not sign exclusivity with several competing consortia for the same call; funders notice, and it damages relationships that outlast the grant.
• If you are new, being a credible downstream partner twice is a faster route to leading than one failed attempt to lead.

The mechanics of consortium bidding are covered in joint ventures and consortium bidding.

The money questions funders actually probe

Budgets are assessed for realism and for compliance, and a budget that is arithmetically correct can still fail on either. Expect scrutiny of:

• Indirect cost recovery — most funders cap overheads at a stated percentage, and some fund only direct costs. Know what your true cost of delivery is, and what the grant will genuinely leave you carrying.
• Co-financing — where required, it must be evidenced and traceable, and in-kind contributions need a defensible valuation method.
• Ineligible costs — commonly items bought before the start date, currency losses, fines, debt, and sometimes vehicle purchase or land. These are listed in the guidelines and are not negotiable later.
• Exchange rate risk — a multi-year grant in a foreign currency can lose real value. Establish which rate applies and who carries the movement.
• Cash flow — many grants reimburse in arrears or pay tranches against approved reports. If a delayed report stops the next tranche, you must still pay staff. Know how many months you can fund from reserves.
• Sustainability — what continues when the grant ends. An answer that amounts to “we will seek further funding” scores poorly.

After you submit

Submission is not the end of the process, and applicants lose grants in this phase more often than they expect.

1. Clarifications. Funders may ask questions with short deadlines. Answer precisely and on time; silence is read as incapacity.
2. Due diligence. The documents above are requested and verified, sometimes with a site visit or a call with your auditor.
3. Negotiation. Budgets are frequently trimmed, or activities cut, before signature. Decide in advance what reduction makes the project undeliverable, and be willing to say so — accepting an unworkable budget creates a failure you will own.
4. Conditions. Read the award conditions as carefully as the call. Reporting frequency, procurement rules that apply to your spending, audit rights, branding requirements and clauses on unspent funds all bind you once signed.

When you are rejected

Most applications are unsuccessful, including strong ones, and the useful question is what to do with that. Ask for feedback — many funders provide scores or a short explanation on request, and it is the cheapest intelligence available. File the proposal properly: problem analysis, logframe, budget structure and CVs are reusable, and a maintained library turns the next application from three weeks into one.

Distinguish between the reasons. Rejected on eligibility means fix the organisation. Rejected on fit means improve funder targeting. Rejected on quality against a good fit means the design or the writing needs work, and that is the most fixable of the three. Reapplying to the same funder after addressing real feedback is common and often successful.

Build the track record deliberately

Funders fund organisations that have already managed money well. That creates an obvious problem for anyone starting, and the way through it is sequencing: take smaller grants you can deliver and account for cleanly, act as a partner to organisations that already hold the relationships, deliver reports on time because timeliness is itself a reference, and ask satisfied funders to serve as referees while the memory is fresh.

A clean audit, a completed project and a funder willing to vouch for you are worth more than any single proposal document — and unlike a proposal, they compound.

In short

• Screen yourself against the hard filters before you write anything.
• Build a funder pipeline in advance, not when cash is short.
• Keep the due-diligence pack current — it decides late-stage rejections.
• Apply to fewer calls, better matched.
• Engage before the call opens, within the rules.
• Choose lead or partner deliberately, and paper the arrangement early.
• Budget for what delivery truly costs, including what the grant will not pay.
• Treat rejection as information and reuse the work.

Browse current opportunities on the grants and funding page, and see how to write a grant proposal that gets funded for the document itself.