Charitable Foundations Editing and Proofreading Services

A grantmaking foundation writes from a position of structural power it did not ask for and cannot avoid. Every applicant is reading for signals, adjusting their work to fit the guidelines, and interpreting silence as judgement. The foundation's documents therefore do more than convey decisions — they shape what the sector applies for, what it claims, and what it stops doing because nobody funds it. Most foundations underestimate how completely their writing directs behaviour beyond their own portfolio.

We edit what grantmaking foundations produce — funding guidelines and eligibility criteria, application forms and their guidance notes, assessment frameworks and internal scoring criteria, grant agreements and conditions, decline letters and feedback to unsuccessful applicants, grant offer and award correspondence, reporting requirements and templates for grantees, monitoring and evaluation frameworks, strategy and priority documents, board and committee papers, trustee recruitment material, published grants data and transparency material, and learning and research publications. Our editors check that what the guidelines ask for is what the assessment actually rewards.

The decline letter is the document foundations write worst and send most. Ninety per cent of applicants receive one, having spent days or weeks on an application, and the standard version — high demand, difficult decisions, we wish you well — tells them nothing and leaves them to guess. The guessing is the problem: an organisation that was declined for fit will rewrite itself to chase the next fund, and one that was declined because the proposal was weak will conclude the sector is closed to them. We write these so the letter states the actual reason at the level the foundation can honestly give — out of scope, in scope but not competitive this round, in scope and fundable but we ran out of money — since those three are entirely different messages and only one of them means try again. Where a foundation cannot offer individual feedback at volume, we write the published round summary that does the same work: how many applied, what was funded, and the two or three things that distinguished successful proposals. That costs one document a year and saves the sector thousands of wasted hours.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including applications, assessments and board papers. We are editors rather than grantmaking or charity law advisers, and we offer no view on funding decisions, strategy or regulatory obligations. What we can do is make guidelines honest about what you fund and correspondence useful to the people who read it.