Is your Foundation using a Letter of Intent to screen grant applicants? If yes, how?

We use a LOI for all of our bigger grant cycles. It helps the nonprofits not to have to spend a lot of time in writing a grant that doesn't interest our committee and it keeps our committee from having to go through the whole process with applications they know they will not be funded. The committee reads each proposal and then use our LOI evaluation form to answer these questions:

Assign the LOI a score between 1 and 10. These scores will be used to determine which organizations are invited to submit a full application. Please utilize the full 1-10 spectrum as you are evaluating the LOIs.

10 = Very interested

5 = Somewhat interested

1 = Not interested

Questions to consider when selecting your score:

1)    Do I think this proposal has potential to make a positive impact in the community?

2)    Does the idea seem feasible?

3)    Does the idea make sense?

4)    Does this proposal/organization bring up any red flags for me?

Staff evaluates these scores and adds any relevant input. The grant uses these scores as a base to the discussion regarding who to invite to a full application. Any questions on the LOI can be shared onto the application so the nonprofit can start there with the full application. I'm happy to share our forms, if they would be helpful to you.

Carol Reynolds

Community Foundation of Hancock County (Indiana)

Carol@CelebrateHancock.org

We use an LOI as a both "pre-application" and to screen for eligibility (rather than using the eligibility tool). Our eligibility requirements are complicated, and applicants often misunderstand or overlook some of them. Those who do apply put in a lot of work to submit a complete application (it's long). Since we don't want them to not apply because they misunderstood our criteria, or to prepare a full application for a project that isn't eligible, we use the LOI to pre-screen each project. Program staff review each LOI for compliance with eligibility criteria and look out for any "red flags". We then issue a formal invitation to apply to all eligible applicants and a letter of denial to those ineligible. The letter documents the grounds on which the invitation or denial was issued. Hope this helps!

Can anyone share some of the questions they use in the LOI process? We have been using it as a pre-application, but are finding we need to beef up our questions for the the LOI to actually be helpful. Thank you!