Charitable Foundations Editing and Proofreading Services

"We received a high number of applications this round and had to make difficult decisions. We wish you well with your important work." Those two sentences are the whole of what an organization learns after six weeks spent on a proposal. One executive director reads them as a verdict on the proposal and rewrites the program to fit the next guidelines. Another reads them as a verdict on the organization and stops applying anywhere.

The documents we edit for Charitable Foundations

Funding guidelines and eligibility criteria are what an applicant reads first, and they come to us more often than anything else. Application forms and their guidance notes follow, along with assessment frameworks, internal scoring criteria, grant agreements and conditions, and the decline letters that close a round. The work also covers award correspondence, reporting requirements and templates for grantees, monitoring and evaluation frameworks, strategy and priority documents, board and committee papers, board recruitment material, published grants data, and learning publications. Our editors read the guidelines against the scoring sheet to see whether the two ask for the same thing.

What the editing involves

The decline letter is the document a foundation writes worst and sends most, and the standard version, built from "high demand" and "difficult decisions," leaves the applicant to guess. Most declines rest on one of the following, and each carries an entirely different message: out of scope, in scope but not competitive this round, and in scope and fundable with the money already committed. Only the last of the three means the same organization should apply again. A letter naming which one applies costs a foundation nothing and saves an applicant a wasted quarter.

The foundation decides which of the three applies. Program staff and the board make that call during assessment, and the reason reaches us with the letter. Our work is to see that the letter states the reason in words an applicant can act on, and that the wording matches the guidelines the applicant was given. A letter saying "your proposal fell outside our current priorities" beside guidelines that never named a priority sends an applicant back to a document that does not hold the answer.

Where individual feedback is not possible at volume, a published round summary does much of the same work. A page of 200 words naming how many applied, how many were funded, the median grant, and what distinguished the proposals that succeeded will answer most of what applicants write in to ask. That is one document a year against several hundred letters. Guidelines and forms deserve the same treatment, because a form asking for a theory of change while the scoring sheet rewards track record sends applicants to work on the wrong section.

Confidentiality and the limits of our role

Everything you send us is treated in confidence, including applications, assessments, and board papers. We are editors, not grantmaking or nonprofit law advisors, and we offer no opinion on funding decisions, strategy, or regulatory obligations. What we can do is make the guidelines say what you fund and the letters useful to the people who receive them.