GEOList Summary: Streamlining Proposal Intake and Review

The National Endowment for Democracy is looking at ways to make our proposal intake and review process more efficient because we seem to be spending a lot of time eliminating unlikely proposals, and we need to make better use of staff time. We currently have an open application process that yields approximately 7000 proposals per year through online applications or emails (we let the grantees choose which way they want to apply). The staff triage, review, and then write up the proposals for our board of directors, which meets four times a year to approve the ones recommended by the staff. Last year we made more than 1400 grants. Approximately 70% of the grants we make every year are to organizations we have funded in the prior year. We are finding it difficult to cope with the flood of incoming proposals. And we are also finding that the proposals we do not recommend to the board are not necessarily ones that are relevant to our funding program (in other words, we turn down a lot of proposals from countries where we just don’t make grants, or that are focused on program areas we don’t fund). Or sometimes they’re barely concepts and we might consider funding them but we don’t have time to help grantees flesh out their ideas before the board meeting, so we have to put them on hold. Either way, that’s a lot of staff time on the proposal intake and review side that we could be spending on monitoring active grants. We are looking for ways to make this process more efficient for our staff, without placing too large a burden on organizations applying for grants. We would be interested in finding out from other foundations what kind of process they use (eligibility quiz; letter of inquiry; explicit language about what the foundation does not fund; etc) during proposal intake that helps them with the triage and review.