The Unfunded List is a nonprofit learning community built around one structural gap in philanthropy: funders receive too many proposals to give meaningful feedback to the ones they turn down. We close that gap. Our volunteer evaluators (experienced funders, nonprofit executives, and sector leaders) review grant proposals that were already submitted to a funder but did not win funding, and deliver a detailed, multi-perspective feedback report to the author.

We review proposals of any size and from any funder type (large federal grants, major international foundation requests, or smaller local community grants) as long as the underlying project supports a social mission. We are not a grant consulting firm, and we do not promise you’ll win future funding. Our role is to give you the kind of honest, expert feedback that funders themselves rarely have time to provide, so you can decide how to move forward, whether that means revising and reapplying, rethinking your strategy, or simply understanding your proposal’s strengths and weaknesses more clearly.

Visit our submission page, complete the online form, and upload your original proposal along with basic information about your project. We accept any format grantmakers require, and we treat your submission with strict confidentiality. Every eligible proposal receives feedback.

We welcome proposals from individuals, organizations, teams, or coalitions working in any sector of social impact. Whether you applied to the National Science Foundation for millions, sought multi-year restricted funding from an international foundation, or requested $25,000 from a small community grantmaker, we are interested. What matters most is that your proposal supports a mission that benefits your community or the public good.

No, Unfunded List does not award grants. Our purpose is to equip you with the kind of thoughtful, specific, and detailed feedback that funders themselves rarely have time to provide, so you can increase your chances of winning funding in subsequent applications.

 You will receive an in-depth written report drawn from multiple reviewers’ perspectives. These reviewers include experienced funders, nonprofit executives, subject matter experts, and social sector leaders. Whenever possible, we try to include evaluators who have direct experience with the issue you are addressing. The report will highlight strengths, identify weaknesses or unclear sections, and offer concrete suggestions for improvement. Many applicants discover strategic adjustments they can make immediately to strengthen their appeal to funders.

We have reviewed over 1,500 proposals, delivering helpful and candid feedback to each one. Organizations of all sizes find value in our approach, which is why many of them come back to us round after round. We recently did an impact study and comparing fundraising totals for groups we reviewed five years after their initial review.

87% were raising more

On average they were raising 213% more.

The average amount raised before applying was 1.5 million.

The average amount raised by these same groups in 2021 was 4.6 million.

We were particularly excited to learn that some of the highest increases came from groups whose proposals we highlighted on previous Unfunded Lists.

RespectAbility raised 60% more for disability inclusion

Global Press Institute raised 180% more for representative journalism

Fast Forward raised 400% more to support tech nonprofits

National Medical Fellowships raised 430% more for BIPOC medical students

Leveling the Playing Field raised 2,960% more to help kids of all income levels play sports.

A: We run review cycles throughout the year. Application windows are posted on our website. We do not recommend waiting until the last minute. Once you know which proposal you’d like for us to review, we recommend submitting as soon as your proposal is ready. 

Yes. There is a one-time $100 administrative fee when you submit your first proposal for review. This covers only a small portion of the actual cost, with the rest funded by our donors and supporters. Once you’ve paid, you may submit future proposals at no charge — some organizations, like Mary’s Center, have had multiple proposals reviewed over the years and only paid once.

Comparable consulting reviews from firms like McKinsey or Deloitte could cost $10,000 or more, without our unique network of evaluators, proprietary review process, or custom feedback software. We deliver far greater value at a fraction of the cost.

If you have questions or concerns about the fee, contact dave@unfundedlist.com.

The proposal should be in the format requested by the grant maker you are applying to.

There are no specific guidelines for formatting proposals other than the original grantmakers guidelines. Your proposal should follow the format provided by the grant maker. Our evaluators will want to see those guidelines so it’s helpful to share as much as you can when you submit your proposal to Unfunded List. Our evaluators also like it when there is financial information included (ideally a project budget).  The ideal proposal length is 4 to 6 pages but we will review anything up to 20 pages in length. Longer proposals might receive less feedback than shorter submissions. If the submission is too short, our evaluators might have unanswered questions.

Please do contact us directly with any specific eligibility questions.

All applicants are expected to carefully read their feedback report and come prepared for a report discussion with our staff. These conversations allow you to ask questions, clarify feedback, and explore opportunities for improvement. Following that discussion, you are free to revise your proposal for future submissions, use it to approach new funders, or reapply to Unfunded List in a later cycle.

Yes.

Our evaluation committee has a vast array of experience working for and with funding organizations of all sizes. A short, but incomplete, list of organizations where committee members work, have previously worked, or have otherwise been involved includes: the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, The Slingshot Fund, The Aspen Institute, Australia’s Greater Charitable Foundation, the Qatar Foundation, the Sehgal Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the White House, the Skoll Award, Echoing Green, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The committee includes experts familiar with the world of international development funding (DFID, USAID, AusAID, the U.S. State Department, National Science Foundation (NSF)).

We also have evaluators who are experienced securing government grants at the local, state and federal level as well as evaluators with experience in corporate grant-making/partnerships. We even have international evaluators from over a dozen countries and almost every continent. Our academic chops are considerable as well. We partner with George Washington University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and we have evaluation committee members on the faculty at Stanford, Duke, and Harvard Universities.

Regardless of the change you are looking to make or the funding institution you are targeting we have evaluators who can help.

We spend a lot of effort building an evaluation committee with a breadth of experience and perspective and we are confident that we can be supportive of any format submitted to any funder. Your proposal will receive the highest quality evaluation to prepare you for success with future submissions to funding organizations. 

We will review one proposal per organization per round. Keep in mind, we review every six months so organizations can submit 2 proposals per year.

No. We are a global learning community and we accept proposals from anywhere. We have reviewed proposals from over 80 different countries and we have evaluators who have experience with most global regions.

Yes. Even if you have been funded before we would love to help you keep going by providing fresh perspectives and comments to support your future applications. Many of the organizations we review for keep coming back to us for feedback after winning funding.

Our program is designed to review grant proposals that were submitted to grant makers through a formal application process. Unsubmitted materials or generic fundraising documents will make it harder for us to make any specific recommendations and we will not be able to compare the materials to the funder’s priorities.

Please do contact us directly with any specific eligibility questions.

One of our first applicants, Accountability Lab, has seen their budget grow from $400k to several million and the Director of their Mali program received one of the first Obama Fellowships. Another Unfunded List honoree, Simprints, applied for the WeWork Creator Awards in London on the recommendation of the Unfunded List evaluation committee and won the first prize of $360,000. They have since won millions in prizes and formed a global partnership with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI). Their founder credits Unfunded List for their success. Recently, Mary’s Center, a health center in Washington DC, won a $250,000 grant from healthcare company Cigna to fund a child nutrition program, the first of its kind in the District. Their initial submission was unsuccessful and then we reviewed it, they resubmitted, and won the grant.

We have helped a disability inclusion organization win their first funding from a foundation that had not funded in that area before. We helped an organization focused on eating disorders (ProjectHeal) to win a six-figure grant from a national foundation. A small organization in DC serving homeless families applied for a grant from a local giving circle. They were rejected. We reviewed their proposal, provided them feedback and had a productive report discussion. The proposal authors submitted a new draft and won the grant on their second attempt. A young doctoral student from Haiti studying at Howard University applied for a grant and was rejected. We reviewed his submission, gave him feedback which he used to resubmit and has won 3 of his 7 submissions this year – his first ever grant awards in over 15 years of operation.

What do other proposal authors have to say about Unfunded List?

Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what past applicants have told us in their own words:

“Last year we had submitted the grant proposal to Rotary and it was not accepted. And this year the same proposal, with modifications, editing based on the feedback we received last year, we submitted to Rotary, same organization, it got approved!”
— Ghanshyam Jethwa, Creshendo

“It’s really helpful for grassroots organizations and youth-run organizations like us to have this kind of feedback… It’s not always shared with us why a grant is successful or not successful, so this was super helpful.”
— Natalie Kwan, Music for Every Child

“The feedback we received was very useful and it directly allowed us to shift some of the language we used in proposals and rethink some of the ways we were explaining what we do and the impact we are having.”
— Blair Glencorse, Accountability Lab

“We cannot tell you how much we appreciate the Unfunded List. The feedback is invaluable. While we always ask for feedback on declined applications, we rarely get a response and even less often get specific feedback.”
— Bethany Simmonds, Food Rescue US

“We think this was really helpful and provided some important context… We actually had a team meeting yesterday. There are a few things in the feedback that we’ve been talking about as a team.”
— Mariah Jolin, Youth & Innovation Project

“I’ve been writing grants since 2009, but in the 17 years since I started, this is the first time I’ve run into a program like this. Thank you so much for creating this organization.”
— Amy Hatter, ProsperityME

Every proposal we review gets this same level of candid, detailed attention, whether it’s a first submission or your fifth.

Our committee is made up of dedicated professionals—including funders, nonprofit leaders, entrepreneurs, and subject matter experts—who volunteer their time to strengthen the social impact sector by sharing practical insights and advice. Whenever possible, we try to include reviewers with direct experience with the issues of the proposal. 

We welcome new reviewers! If you are passionate about helping promising ideas reach their potential, complete our reviewer interest form on the website. We’ll get in touch to discuss your experience and the review process.

Reviewers commit to reading and providing thoughtful feedback on proposals during our review cycles. We prioritize fairness, clarity, and actionable advice. Training and support are available for new committee members.

We also actively recruit our applicants to become reviewers. Approximately one-fifth of the committee has also been reviewed by us and most reports include someone who is also fundraising or has experience fundraising on the same issue or topic.

One hour on average. Some of our speedier evaluators can review a proposal in under half an hour. Others do deeper research and might spend a few hours on their reviews. 

We encourage our evaluators to take as much time as they need. Just please hit our deadlines and give honest feedback to the proposals you have been assigned.

Serving on our evaluation committee is both a personal growth experience and a professional development opportunity. Reviewers sharpen their critical thinking and grant evaluation skills, gain exposure to innovative projects from all over the world, and expand their networks with fellow leaders in philanthropy, nonprofits, and social enterprise.

It’s also a direct and meaningful way to help sustain small and emerging organizations. Groups that often operate with limited resources but deliver outsized impact in their communities. Many proposals you review will come from organizations whose long-term stability can be significantly strengthened by your feedback.

Our evaluators consistently report high satisfaction with the experience, with over 90% saying they find the work rewarding and would recommend it to others.

Each round, you’ll be matched to a small batch, typically three to five proposals, based on your professional background and areas of interest. Whenever possible, we try to match you with proposals related to issues you have direct experience with, so your feedback carries real expertise rather than general impressions. Proposals come from organizations of all sizes and sectors, working on every kind of social mission, from small local nonprofits to large-scale international efforts, so you can expect variety within your batch even as it’s tailored to your background.

Yes, and we encourage it. Roughly one-fifth of our evaluation committee has also had a proposal reviewed by Unfunded List, and most feedback reports include at least one evaluator who is also actively fundraising or has direct fundraising experience on the same issue. We believe breaking down the wall between grantseekers and grantmakers benefits everyone: evaluating other proposals often sharpens your own grant writing, and your firsthand experience as an applicant makes your feedback to others more grounded and useful.

Yes. We hold free trainings each round to help evaluators get comfortable with the process, including a general proposal review Q&A along with sessions on more specific skills like budget review. New evaluators also get direct support from our team as they get started. You’re never expected to figure it out alone, and we encourage evaluators to take as much time as they need with each review, as long as deadlines are met and the feedback is honest.

Co-review is when the Unfunded List Evaluation Committee partners with a grant maker to offer our review to every applicant. Grantmakers focus on making granting decisions and our committee focuses on giving feedback to every applicant.

During co-review with Unfunded List, a funder that receives submissions conducts their process as they normally would. They search for the next great solutions, award funds, and support the winning grantees. Meanwhile, Unfunded List focuses their support on everyone else who applied. Each organization receives one of our helpful and candid feedback reports including reviews from multiple evaluators as well as the opportunity to have a report discussion with Unfunded List Staff.

Our independent evaluation committee offers our review to all of the applicants of our partner program. Once a group opts in, we do not choose winners, but instead we provide helpful and candid feedback and suggestions for everyone, along with recommendations and feedback for the grantmaker after we are done.

Unfunded List is a 501c3 not-for-profit founded in 2015. Our mission is to educate the public about philanthropy which we do by engaging our learning community in the regular review of grant proposals. Working with grantmakers on co-review allows us to develop the reviewing skills of our evaluation committee while providing useful and candid feedback to proposal authors. We have conducted co-review partnerships with SOLVE at MIT, The Elevate Prize, Kettering Family Foundation, Circle for Justice Innovations Fund, Mentor Capital Network, Next Gen Giving Circle, Dental Trade Alliance Foundation, KujaLink and several others.

All kinds. We have over 1000 evaluators in our pool from all walks of life. We offer regular training sessions in philanthropy and make ourselves evaluators for conversations and zoom calls with our evaluators during their review. We encourage our evaluators to rely on their own experience and perspectives.

The professional grant writers on our committee will comment on things like formatting, phrasing, funder fit, and impact metrics. Issue experts will focus on impact and implementation as well as the accuracy of claims. Editors tend to focus on spelling and grammar. Social entrepreneurs and founders offer advice from a peer perspective while our more senior, retired evaluators focus on mentorship and advice. Some of our funders consider proposals for their own philanthropy and the connectors on our committee think about who to apply to next. We do our best to include a multitude of perspectives in each report.

We have been co-reviewing for over three years now, but this is a newer (and exciting) aspect. As we evaluate a large batch of proposals all submitted to the same grantmaker, certain trends and comments begin to emerge. For instance, during our first year co-reviewing with The Elevate Prize, a large number of our evaluators noted in their review that the proposal was very long and that some of the questions were repetitive. We passed these notes along to The Elevate Prize staff and they shortened and focussed their application for the second year of their prize. When we co-reviewed with Kettering Family Foundation our evaluators noticed some confusing language in the RFP and had questions about geographic location. We were able to pass these notes on to Trustees and administrators at Kettering who are now discussing ways to address our comments.

As we continue to co-review with these groups, particularly with groups who are willing and able to make changes to their philanthropic process, we can continue to be helpful in guiding those changes.

We partner with grant makers in ways that can benefit their programs but when we do it is always and primarily in service of our mission to educate the public about philanthropy. The primary ways we partner with grantmakers are to conduct co-review partnerships and to produce content related to philanthropy education.

In particular, we do not provide wealth or fund management services, fundraising or resource development services (beyond proposal review), we do not fiscally sponsor and we do not provide PR or marketing services, nor legal nor accounting services.