Most applications are declined not because the work is weak, but because the writing leaves a reviewer guessing. This guide sets out how we read an application, in the order we read it, so you can spend your effort where it changes the decision.
Key points
- State the problem in one paragraph a stranger could repeat back to you.
- Make the plan, the timeline and the budget tell the same story.
- Claim only what you can evidence, and say plainly what you do not yet know.
- Write for a reader who has thirty minutes and eleven other applications.
Start with the problem, not the organization
The first thing a reviewer wants is a clear statement of what is wrong, who it affects, and why it persists. Open with that. History about your organization belongs later; it answers a different question.
A strong problem statement is specific about place and population, honest about scale, and sourced. If your evidence is your own operational data, say so and describe how it was collected. Reviewers trust modest, well-described evidence far more than large unattributed numbers.
- Who is affected, where, and roughly how many.
- What currently happens to them, and what is missing.
- Why existing provision does not close the gap.
- What changes if this work happens.
Make the plan fit the money and the time
Reviewers test proportionality constantly. A plan that promises system change on a twelve-month budget reads as inexperience, not ambition. Describe the specific activities you will deliver, who delivers them, and in what sequence.
Where the work depends on other people — a ministry signing off, a clinic sharing space, a school releasing teacher time — name that dependency and describe your fallback. Naming a risk does not weaken an application. Hiding one that a reviewer can see does.
Let the budget confirm the narrative
Read your budget as if you had not written the narrative. Does it describe the same project? If the narrative centres on community facilitators but the budget is dominated by a national coordinator and travel, the reviewer will believe the budget.
Include the unglamorous costs: supervision, safeguarding, finance time, translation, accessibility, insurance, audit. Applications that omit these are usually revised later at the applicant's expense.
Evidence, and the limits of it
Show what you already know works, at whatever scale you have tested it. A pilot with twelve participants, described precisely, is stronger than a claim of transformation with no method behind it.
Be explicit about your uncertainties and how the funded work will reduce them. Reviewers are choosing between plausible plans; the applicant who has thought hardest about being wrong usually has the better plan.
Before you submit
Give yourself a day away from the draft, then read it once as a stranger and once as a finance officer. Check that every figure quoted in the narrative appears identically in the budget, and that every document requested has actually been attached.
- One-paragraph problem statement that stands alone.
- Activities, timeline and budget in agreement.
- Named risks with realistic mitigations.
- All required documents attached, current, and legible.