Prepared for Evaluators, Authors & Partners | August 2026
This report analyzes patterns from Unfunded List’s Spring 2026 review round: 854 individual evaluator reviews across 96 proposals, plus a sample of one-on-one report discussions held with authors after their feedback reports were delivered. It is meant as a shared resource for our learning community: evaluators, proposal authors, funders, and anyone working in or around the grants profession.
About This Report
Unfunded List runs two review rounds a year, matching submitted grant proposals with volunteer evaluators who provide detailed, multi-perspective feedback. Spring 2026 (Round 22) was one of our largest rounds yet with 96 proposals reviewed by 250 evaluators who completed 854 reviews providing an average of nearly 9 reviews per feedback report.
The findings below draw on two layers of source material:
– The full set of 854 written evaluator reviews from Round 22, across every proposal and every rating category.
– A sample of transcripts from one-on-one report discussions, the follow-up conversations Unfunded List holds with proposal authors after their feedback reports go out. This sample covers 19 discussions, a meaningful cross-section of the 96 proposals reviewed this round.
– Everything in this report has been generalized and anonymized. No proposal, organization, evaluator, or author is identified. Where we quote directly, quotes are drawn from written reviews or conversation and stripped of any identifying detail.
Executive Summary
Across hundreds of pieces of written feedback and dozens of hours of follow-up conversation, a small number of themes accounted for the overwhelming majority of what evaluators told authors. Proposals were rarely rejected for being poorly written, dishonest, or unworthy. According to our evaluators, they were held back by a handful of specific, fixable gaps: unclear distinction between what an organization does and what changes because of it; budgets that do not explain themselves; narrative squeezed out by tight character limits; and a mismatch between the proposal’s language and the specific funder’s stated priorities.
Three fourths of the reviews also included feedback for the funder. Evaluators (many of whom are grant professionals or funders themselves) surfaced a consistent set of structural frustrations: application forms with inconsistent or seemingly arbitrary constraints, unclear guidance on what counts as fit, and a widening gap between funders’ stated interest in collaboration or community voice and the mechanics of the proposal formats they actually use to evaluate it.
Conversations with authors after their reports were delivered (we call these “report discussions”) added a layer that written reviews alone do not capture: how much clarity, relief, and concrete next-step planning came out of simply having a knowledgeable outside reader talk through the feedback with them, and how often relationship-building, more than proposal polish, was the deciding factor in whether a good idea got funded.
Round 22 By the Numbers
– 96 proposals reviewed, up from 55 in Spring of 2025
– 250 volunteer evaluators, 854 completed reviews (nearly 9 per proposal)
– 653 of 854 reviews (76%) included a comment addressed specifically to the funder, not just the author
Who Submitted
A quick methodology note before the numbers below: Unfunded List’s intake process does not currently collect clean, structured fields for an organization’s budget size, headquarters location, or funder type. What follows is drawn from two sources: keyword patterns across evaluator commentary in the full set of 854 reviews (a noisier signal than a structured field, so treat the shares below as directional, not precise) and the more detailed, reliable picture from our sample of 19 report discussions.
What Causes Were Represented
Education and youth development touched roughly three-quarters of Round 22 proposals in some way, the largest single category. Health and behavioral health showed up in roughly half. Climate and environmental work made up a smaller, though meaningful, share, consistent with what Unfunded List’s own evaluator sign-up data shows year over year: health and education reliably draw the largest pool of interested evaluators, youth-focused work a close second, and climate a smaller, if steadily growing, category. Workforce development, arts and culture, and women- and girl-focused programming were all well represented. Smaller but present categories included housing and homelessness, disability services, immigration and refugee support, criminal justice and legal aid, veterans’ services, and international development.
Where Organizations Were Based and Worked
Submissions came from across the country, with a visible concentration in the D.C., Maryland, and Virginia region, alongside proposals from Texas, the Midwest, the Mountain West, and the Northeast (specifically Maine). A meaningful share of the round was international, or U.S.-based organizations doing work abroad, including proposals connected to Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Madagascar, Togo, Argentina, Haiti, Canada, New Zealand and Afghanistan.
Organization Size and Stage
Report discussions in particular made the range here clear. Submitting organizations spanned from solo-founder, all-volunteer efforts operating on a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a year, to established nonprofits with multi-million-dollar budgets and full development teams. Some were brand-new organizations submitting their first-ever grant proposal to anyone. Others were long-time participants in Unfunded List’s own review process, on their third, fourth submission to us. One organization notably was receiving their 18th review.
Who They Applied To
The funders named across submissions were similarly wide-ranging: national and regional private foundations, family foundations, corporate and workplace giving programs, a hospital-affiliated funder, U.S. federal grant programs, at least one large-scale challenge or prize program, and one Canadian government agency. That range, from small, five-figure family foundation requests to six- and seven-figure government or challenge-philanthropy opportunities, is a meaningful part of why “who the funder is” mattered so much to the feedback evaluators gave, and why funder-specific tailoring shows up so often in the themes below.
Who Are Our Evaluators?
A methodology note: this section is built from an export of 186 confirmed evaluators who completed all of their assigned reviews, including their own self-reported answers on affiliation, qualifications, motivation for joining, and topic interests.
Scale and Engagement
These 186 evaluators completed 720 reviews between them, an average of just under four completed reviews each, with individual evaluators completing as few as one and as many as seven. Nearly all (184 of 186) continue to hold confirmed evaluator status with Unfunded List.
Professional Backgrounds
Evaluators’ self-described affiliations span a genuinely wide range, and many describe backgrounds that cross more than one category. Roughly a fifth work in grant writing or nonprofit consulting practices, either independently or through a firm. Close to a fifth are staff at foundations or funders themselves. About one in six are staff at nonprofit, direct-service organizations, and similar numbers work in government, academia, or international development. A substantial share, over four in ten, describe more individual or hybrid roles: independent practitioners, retirees, career-changers, and specialists who do not fit neatly into a single organizational category, which is itself a fair reflection of how varied the proposal reviewing community actually is.
Why They Join
Asked why they wanted to evaluate, evaluators most often pointed to professional development: about four in ten explicitly described the work as a way to sharpen their own grant-writing or grant-making skills. Smaller shares cited wanting to give back to the field, and firsthand experience as grant writers themselves looking to see the process from the other side.
What They Want to Review
Evaluators’ self-reported interests closely track what proposals actually came in this round. Education and youth-focused work was the single most requested area, named by roughly a third of evaluators, followed by health and public health at about a quarter. Arts and culture, and women- and girls-focused work, were each named by roughly one in six. International development, environment and climate, and human rights or social justice work followed close behind, each named by roughly one in ten to one in seven evaluators. Smaller numbers specifically requested homelessness and poverty, faith-based, animal welfare, or disability-focused proposals. About one in eight evaluators said they were open to reviewing any topic at all.
How They Found Us
Among evaluators who described how they learned about Unfunded List, LinkedIn was the single most-named channel, followed by referrals from a colleague or friend, direct search, and grant-professional conferences and events.
What We Heard: Major Themes in Evaluator Feedback
1. Clarity Beats Polish
The single most common compliment across reviews was some version of “clear and well written.” But evaluators were careful to distinguish that from a strong program. A clean, readable proposal with a vague program design drew far more follow-up questions than a rougher one where the core idea was unmistakable. Evaluators repeatedly said they could tell within a page or two whether an organization actually knew, in specific terms, what it does day to day.
One reviewer put it this way: “This is a generally well written proposal, and at the heart of what you’re doing I understand what the program is at its core, but I would like to see more.”
The most common single gap was missing baseline context: an organization would describe how much it wanted to grow (more students, more sites, more people served) without ever stating the current scale it was growing from. Evaluators cannot judge feasibility or ambition without both numbers.
2. The Outputs-Outcomes Gap
This was the most frequently cited weakness across the entire dataset. Proposals reliably described what an organization does (workshops held, people served, sessions delivered) but far less reliably described what changed as a result. Evaluators consistently asked for at least a sentence or two translating activity into outcome: not just how many students attended, but what happened to them afterward.
Authors in report discussions described this less as a writing problem than a data problem: many organizations, especially newer or merged ones, genuinely do not yet track long-term outcomes and are not sure how to talk about goals they have not measured yet. The most common practical fix evaluators offered: even a single well-told story of one participant’s trajectory can carry an outcome argument that an organization does not yet have the statistics to make.
3. Budget Clarity and the Sustainability Paradox
Budget was the single most-commented-on section in the entire review set. Two patterns dominated. First, evaluators wanted budgets that explained themselves: what a grant would actually buy, in plain terms, even when a formal budget was not required. A per-participant or per-unit cost framing (this grant funds X people at $Y each) came up again and again as a clear way to give a funder a tangible sense of impact.
Second, and more structural: organizations are regularly asked to simultaneously prove they are financially sustainable and prove they urgently need funding, and evaluators noticed how hard that balance is to strike. A negative operating position or heavy reliance on one grant, left unexplained, reads as a red flag. But a proposal that shows too much stability can undercut its own urgency. The strongest proposals evaluators saw threaded this by being transparent about existing committed support (which reassures a funder they are not the only one in the room) while still being specific about what additional funding would make possible that current resources cannot.
4. Storytelling Under Constraint
Narrative and data were both flagged as under-used, but for different reasons. Many application formats now carry very tight character limits, and evaluators noted that organizations frequently spend that limited space re-describing their program rather than telling a single, specific, human story. A recurring piece of advice, both in written reviews and in report discussions: a short, concrete story of one person’s experience does more persuasive work in limited space than another paragraph of general description.
At the same time, evaluators pushed back gently on organizations who under-shared real numbers because they seemed small. Framing (percentages, year-over-year growth, cost-per-participant) came up repeatedly as a way to make honest, modest numbers land with more weight, without exaggeration.
“I’ve already used this feedback for other things now. I’ve added more data, I’ve added more storytelling, and I’ve used every single character that is given to me.”
5. Redundancy and Structure
A structural critique showed up across many longer applications: sections like “Activities,” “Recent Results,” and “Goals” often repeated the same program description almost verbatim rather than building on each other. Evaluators generally do not assume that a reader will read every section, or read them in order, so a small amount of intentional repetition of core facts is fine. But wholesale duplication reads as wasted space that could instead carry the day-to-day narrative or outcome detail funders were asking for.
Un-explained acronyms and jargon were a smaller but recurring irritant: evaluators, like funders, often are not subject-matter experts, and organizational shorthand that is not spelled out costs an application clarity points it did not need to lose.
6. Funder-Fit and Tailored Language
Evaluators repeatedly noted when a strong organization submitted a proposal that was well-written but not well-targeted: a generic or reused document, rather than one built around a specific funder’s stated priorities and language. The clearest version of this pattern was the use of a single master proposal template submitted to many different funders; reviewers consistently flagged the resulting fit concerns, even when the underlying work was strong. Mirroring a funder’s own vocabulary (the specific words they use to describe who and what they fund) was the most frequently repeated piece of tailoring advice.
A related and more values-laden version of this came up in a handful of report discussions: proposals that included subject matter tangential to the core ask (references to positions or issues outside a funder’s stated focus area) tended to create confusion for evaluators trying to assess fit, regardless of the merits of the position itself. The consistent advice was about relevance and clarity for the specific funder, not the substance of the material.
7. Format Mismatches: Pitch Decks and Non-Traditional Submissions
A meaningful share of proposals this round arrived as pitch decks rather than traditional written proposals, especially from organizations with a more entrepreneurial orientation. Evaluators are accustomed to grant proposals and can find decks harder to review: they often assume an accompanying conversation or document, leave the specific funding ask vague, and do not always show program economics in enough detail. Evaluators consistently pointed to two fixes: state the specific ask plainly (an amount, a partnership type, a next step) even in deck format, and use simple tables or charts to convey the same scope and budget detail that would otherwise live in paragraphs.
Common Suggestions to Proposal Authors
Pulled together across hundreds of reviews and dozens of conversations, these were the pieces of advice evaluators and Unfunded List staff repeated most often:
– State your current scale before stating your growth goal. “We want to serve 300 more students” only means something if the reader knows the current number.
– Translate at least one output into an outcome. Say what changed, not just what you did.
– Use a per-participant or per-unit cost framing when a formal budget is not required. It gives funders something concrete to evaluate.
– Name your existing committed funders and partners by name where possible. It reassures a funder they are not the only one taking a chance on you.
– Tell one specific story rather than re-describing your program a second time. A name, a moment, a before-and-after does more work than another paragraph of description.
– Mirror the funder’s own language. Read their site, their RFP, and their past grantee list, and use the words they use, not just the words that describe your work internally.
– Don’t assume every reader has read every section. Repeat the essential one sentence of context where needed, but do not repeat whole paragraphs.
– If you’re using AI to help draft or tighten language, keep the community voice in it. Evaluators and funders alike said the biggest tell (and the biggest turn-off) in AI-assisted writing is polished language with no specific, human detail underneath it.
– Relationship building is not optional in a crowded field. A short, genuine introduction, a follow-up after a rejection, or simply making sure your website and 990 are current and findable, consistently outweighed marginal improvements in proposal polish.
What Evaluators Said About Funders
Evaluators, many of whom are themselves grant professionals or program officers, used the space we offer for funder-facing comments often: in 76% of reviews. Read across hundreds of comments, a few structural criticisms came up again and again.
Application Design Inconsistencies
Character and word limits varied widely and were sometimes clearly set without testing: one open-ended narrative question in an application reviewed this round appeared to carry a 40-character limit, not enough for a single sentence, let alone the multiple items the question asked for. On the opposite end of the spectrum, our evaluators and authors alike noted that unusually generous, unlimited-length fields caused the opposite problem: submissions that ran far too long for any reviewer to reasonably get through.
Ambiguous Eligibility and Fit Language
A recurring comment asked funders to clarify what phrases like “serving the region” or “organizations working in X” actually mean in practice, especially for Proposal Authors whose work crosses geographic or program boundaries. Several evaluators also noted a gap between funders’ stated openness (language suggesting no geographic preference, for instance) and the funder’s actual, observable giving pattern, which often skews heavily toward organizations with an existing personal or geographic connection to the funder’s own board or founders.
Collaboration Is Praised in Theory, Penalized in Practice
Funders frequently say they want to see organizations collaborating. But evaluators noted that most proposal formats are structurally built for a single organization answering to a single funder, and multi-organization proposals often left the applicant’s own specific role unclear as a direct result. The mismatch between funders’ stated preference for collaborative work and formats that do not accommodate it well was raised as a genuine, unresolved tension in the field, not a fault of any one applicant.
Inconsistent Expectations Around Urgency and Sustainability
As referenced above, evaluators noticed funders sending mixed signals: some proposals were docked for showing financial instability, while, in at least one documented case from a competitive giving-circle process, a very similar organization was penalized in the opposite direction for appearing too financially secure to need the money. Evaluators generally agreed this creates a difficult, sometimes contradictory needle for Proposal Authors to thread, and that funders would benefit from being clearer about which they actually prioritize.
Volunteer-Driven Organizations Face a Specific Credibility Gap
Several reviews and report discussions surfaced a persistent funder misconception: that an organization staffed substantially by volunteers has proportionally lower costs and therefore lower funding need. Evaluators pushed back on this in feedback, noting that volunteer coordination, training, and support still carry real costs, and that this assumption can unfairly disadvantage lean, high-impact organizations.
Inundated: A Widening Gap Between Application Volume and Funder Capacity
This was less a specific criticism than a repeated observation, echoed by multiple evaluators who are themselves funders: many programs are receiving several times more applications than in past years, without a corresponding increase in staff capacity to read them. This is contributing to less individualized attention per application, a greater reliance on existing relationships and warm introductions, and, in some cases, funders quietly capping or pausing open submissions altogether.
Behind the Feedback: Insights from Report Discussions
A methodology note: this section draws on a sample of 19 one-on-one report discussions out of 96 proposals reviewed this round, held between June and July 2026. It is a substantial and varied cross-section, but not the full round, and should be read as directionally representative rather than exhaustive.
“Having the chance to have a proposal reviewed is not only insightful but helpful at building my skills to be a better grant writer, a better storyteller, and a better leader.”
The Discussions Surface Things the Written Reviews Alone Don’t
Authors consistently described the conversation itself, not just the written report, as valuable: a chance to ask what a specific piece of feedback actually meant, to get a second opinion from someone with no stake in the proposal, and in several cases to get help settling internal disagreements about strategy or messaging that predated the proposal itself. More than one author used the report discussion to make the case internally, to a board or a leadership team, for a strategic shift that reviewers’ feedback had validated from the outside.
As one author described it, having a knowledgeable outsider look at a proposal is a bit like proofreading your own paper: you know what you meant to say, and it takes someone else to notice that what actually made it onto the page is not quite the same thing.
“That report was beyond anything that I thought we would receive, and so helpful.”
Relationship-Building Was the Single Most Repeated Piece of Advice
Across nearly every discussion, regardless of the proposal’s sector or the funder in question, the same underlying message came through: cold applications to funders who do not know the applicant, especially family foundations and smaller funders, face very long odds, particularly as funders report receiving several times more applications than in past years. Authors were consistently encouraged to research funders deeply (giving histories, board composition, geographic and personal ties), to follow up after both acceptances and rejections, and to treat a funder’s public materials, social media, and 990 filings as part of the application itself, since evaluators and funders alike often check them.
Authors Who Also Evaluate Get More Out of the Program, and Give More Back
A clear and repeated pattern: authors who went on to review other organizations’ proposals described it as genuinely valuable professional development, distinct from and complementary to receiving their own feedback. Several authors credited proposals they reviewed for other organizations with directly improving their own grant writing. Unfunded List’s own framing, that the program has as much impact on its volunteer evaluators as on the authors it reviews, was borne out repeatedly in these conversations.
A Few Concrete Wins
Several authors reported directly attributable outcomes from the feedback process: one organization credited a specific piece of budget feedback with a successful grant application the following cycle; another used feedback to secure a follow-up capacity-building conversation with a funder who had initially declined; several described concrete changes to their organizational website, budget narrative, or theory of change made directly in response to evaluator comments.
“We took the feedback very seriously, and here we are: this year we got the grant. I would attribute a great extent of the success to Unfunded List feedback.”
The Wider Landscape: Grantseeking in 2026
A few broader patterns came up often enough, across both proposals and conversations, to be worth naming as sector-level context rather than proposal-specific feedback.
– Application volume is rising sharply. Multiple evaluators who work as funders described receiving several times more applications than in prior years, a trend attributed to some combination of continued federal funding cuts, a growing number of nonprofits overall, and the accessibility of AI-assisted proposal writing.
– AI is now a normal part of grant writing, and most funders seem to know it. Feedback did not suggest funders are penalizing AI-assisted drafting outright. The more consistent concern, echoed by evaluators, was proposals that read as generic or lost the applicant’s own community voice, regardless of whether AI was involved in producing them.
– Federal funding cuts were referenced as a live, practical constraint across a range of causes and geographies, prompting many organizations to pivot toward private and family foundation funding, individual giving, and relationship-based fundraising strategies.
– The founder’s conundrum. A number of small, founder-led organizations described a familiar bind: they need funding to build the staff capacity that would make them more fundable, but funders are often reluctant to fund organizations that look under-resourced. This tension came up often enough, across unrelated causes, to be worth naming as a structural pattern rather than an individual organization’s problem.
– Politically sensitive language is a live drafting challenge for many organizations right now, independent of the substance of any particular position. Several authors described needing to rework standard language (around identity, equity, or other currently contested terms) to match individual funders’ evolving comfort levels, adding a new layer of complexity to an already tailored writing process.
Appendix: Feedback By Rating Category
A brief, structured summary of what evaluators most consistently said within each of Unfunded List’s standard review categories.
Budget Quality
The single most-commented category. Evaluators want budgets that are readable at a glance, tied clearly to the narrative, and honest about gaps, in-kind support, and other committed funding. Negative or unclear operating positions need a one-sentence explanation, not silence.
Measurability of Goals
The line between outputs (activities delivered) and outcomes (change achieved) was the most frequent point of confusion. Evaluators consistently asked for at least one or two outcome-level statements, even if the bulk of the reporting is necessarily output-based.
Sustainability Considerations
Evaluators want to see a credible plan beyond the grant period, but not at the cost of admitting continued need. The strongest proposals showed existing committed support alongside a clear case for why additional funding is still necessary.
Network Strength / Partnership Potential
Evaluators paid close attention to named partnerships, community relationships, and prior funders, treating them as credibility signals. Vague claims of “strong partnerships” without specifics were consistently flagged.
Community & Inclusivity
Strongest when proposals could point to concrete mechanisms for community voice and leadership, not just representation. Generic statements of commitment to equity or inclusion were less persuasive than specific structures.
Feasibility Considerations
Evaluators wanted a clear sense of scale: how big is the current program, and what does the proposed growth actually represent. Ambitious jumps in scale drew more scrutiny than ambitious goals.
Novelty & Comparative Context
Proposals that could clearly say why they, and not another organization, were positioned to do this work fared better. This was often about specificity of niche, not overall size or prestige.
This report was prepared by Unfunded List from Round 22 evaluator feedback and report discussion conversations. All examples are generalized and anonymized. Questions about this report, or requests for future rounds, can be directed to dave@unfundedlist.com.
