Writing a letter of inquiry that gets a proposal invited
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A letter of inquiry is not a compressed proposal. It is a screening document, and the program officer reading it is trying to answer one question quickly: is this worth a full review?
Writing it as a miniature proposal — problem statement, methodology, evaluation plan, sustainability — is the most common mistake, and it fails because it answers questions nobody has asked yet.
What is actually being checked
Are you eligible? Geography, organization type, program area, sometimes budget size. This is a yes/no, and it is the first thing checked. If you cannot state clearly and early that you are within their guidelines, you get screened out before anything else is read.
Do you fit what they actually fund? Not what their website says they fund — what their grant list shows. Program officers know their own portfolio, and an applicant who obviously does not resemble it reads as someone who did no research.
Is the amount sensible? A request far above their median grant answers itself.
Can you write clearly? Uncomfortable but real. An LOI is a two-page writing sample, and a program officer extrapolating from it to a twenty-page proposal is making a reasonable inference about how much work you will be.
Did you follow the instructions? Length, format, deadline, what to include. This is the cheapest screen a funder has, and plenty of applications fail it.
The structure that works
Open with the ask, not the mission. One sentence: who you are, what you do, what you want, how much. A program officer reading fifty of these should know within ten seconds what is being requested. Save the mission statement — they will read the rest if the first sentence earns it.
One short paragraph on the need, specific to your community and, where possible, with a number attached. Not the national statistic. The local one.
One paragraph on what you will do with the money. Concrete. Who does what, for how many people, over what period. Resist listing every activity — pick the spine of the program.
One paragraph on why you. Track record, not aspiration. What you have already done that makes this credible.
Two sentences on fit. This is the paragraph most LOIs omit and the one that most often earns an invitation. Name why this funder — something specific from their giving history or stated interest that connects to your work. It demonstrates the research the rest of the letter implies.
Close with the amount, the total program cost, and a clear next step. “We are requesting $25,000 toward a $92,000 program and would welcome the opportunity to submit a full proposal.”
What to leave out
The founding story. The full board list. Attachments nobody asked for. Adjectives.
Also leave out anything that sounds like it was written for a different funder. Recycling is inevitable and fine, but a letter mentioning priorities this foundation does not have is worse than a generic one — it proves you are sending the same thing everywhere.
The research that has to happen first
An LOI cannot fix a bad fit, and fit is visible before you write.
Pull the funder’s 990 grant list. Check three things: whether organizations like yours appear on it, what the median grant is, and whether the list repeats year over year. A grant list that is 90% identical across three years is a closed system funding existing relationships, and a cold LOI there is a low-probability shot no matter how well written. See reading a 990-PF for the rest of it.
Candid’s Foundation Directory carries the most authoritative version of that grant history and is free on site at hundreds of partner libraries. GrantStation at about $199 a year covers private, corporate and government funders if you need breadth over depth. Instrumentl adds funder matching and a deadline pipeline from $179/mo, which is worth it past roughly ten live applications — our grant research software guide has the threshold.
After you send it
Log it: funder, date, amount, program, expected response window. Then leave it alone.
If the guidelines state a response time, wait it out before following up once. If they say you will only hear if invited, that is the whole process — do not follow up at all, and do not read silence as anything other than a decline.
An invitation is not an award. Invited proposals still get declined. But the fit question has been settled in your favour, which is the hardest part, and the odds from there are far better than a cold submission ever offers.
Common questions
How long should a letter of inquiry be?
Whatever the funder says. Where no length is given, two pages is the norm and one is often better. An LOI that runs long signals that the applicant did not read the instructions, which is exactly the trait the screen exists to catch.
Should an LOI include a budget?
Only if asked. Most LOIs want a total program cost and the amount you are requesting, in a sentence, not a spreadsheet. Attaching an unrequested budget is a small instruction-following failure at the stage where instruction-following is what is being tested.
What happens after an LOI is accepted?
You are invited to submit a full proposal, usually to a deadline and often with a specific format. An invitation is not an award — invited proposals are still declined — but your odds improve substantially because the fit question has already been settled.
Can I follow up on an unanswered LOI?
Once, after the stated response window has passed, briefly and politely. If the guidelines say you will only hear back if invited, believe them and do not follow up at all.
This post is part of the guide to the grassroots fundraising stack (under $250k raised).