By Staff

A: This is a commonly asked question with no single or simple answer. Many factors, like the foundation's priorities, the nonprofit's capacity, the project's quality, and the proposal itself, among other things, influence a grantmaker's decision to accept a proposal. What is true is that most foundations receive more proposals than they can fund. This is especially true for well-known foundations.

One source that gets close to answering this question is the Foundation Center's Foundation Growth and Giving Estimates. Based on responses from 878 grantmakers, in 2014:

One-third received fewer than 50 proposals; 38 percent of them funded at least half of the proposals.

6 percent received more than 1,000 proposals each; 11 percent of them funded at least half of the proposals.

Overall, 35 percent funded 50 percent or more of the grant requests they received.

Corporate foundations receive a higher volume of proposals, compared to independent and community foundations.

Foundations that reported giving of less than $1 million funded a larger share of their grant requests than foundations with giving of $10 million or more.

By far, the most frequent reasons that foundations reject proposals are:

They don't have enough funds to accept every request.

The request falls outside of the funder's giving interests.

The applicant didn't follow application guidelines.

One simple piece of advice we often give is, "If you don't qualify, don't apply."