Your Letter of Intent is Your First Positioning Opportunity

Most nonprofit leaders treat the Letter of Intent (LOI) like a smaller version of the full grant application. You answer the questions, describe your programs, summarize your budget, and send it off hoping you made it through to the next round.

But that approach is costing you invitations you should be receiving.

An LOI is the first time a funder gets to decide whether your organization belongs in the conversation, and how you show up in that moment determines whether you get to have it at all.

The Question Every Funder Is Asking

Every foundation receives more requests than they can fund. The LOI exists to help program officers move quickly to identify which organizations align with their priorities and which do not. That means they are not reading your LOI to learn about the issue. They already know the issue. They funded it last year and the year before.

What they are trying to figure out in the few minutes they spend on your submission is one thing: why your organization? Not why the problem is urgent, but why you (your relationships, your credibility, your strategy, your history with the people you serve) are the right partner for the work they want to fund.

That is a different question from the one most LOIs are written to answer.

Lead With Who You Are

One of the most common patterns in LOIs from community-rooted organizations is that the first two paragraphs are almost entirely about the problem. They read like a needs assessment: statistics, disparity data, a thorough accounting of how serious the situation is. But funders are not reading your LOI to be convinced that the problem is real. They funded it last year and will most likely fund it next year. What they do not yet know is whether your organization is the right one to address it.

What they need to understand is why your organization has the trust, the expertise, and the relationships to make meaningful progress on it. What makes your community choose you? What have you built that nobody else has? What does your approach make possible that a newer or less-rooted organization could not replicate?

Those are the details that distinguish one application from the rest.

The Letter of Intent Should Demonstrate Alignment

Most experienced funders can spot the organization that has rewritten itself to match the foundation's language. Every priority area on the funder's website appears in the application, every phrase gets mirrored back, and the organization sounds exactly like what the funder said they were looking for because they shaped themselves around it.

Reshaping your language to mirror a funder's priorities is performance, and experienced program officers recognize it quickly. The LOIs that earn invitations reveal a genuine fit rather than constructing one, using the funder's framework as a lens to illuminate work already underway rather than as a script to replicate.

If a funder values community leadership, show how community members shape your programs and influence your decisions rather than simply repeating the phrase. If they prioritize systems change, explain the specific systems your work is moving and how it is moving them. Alignment is demonstrated through evidence, and the evidence you already have is more compelling than any language you could borrow from a foundation's website.

Make It Easy for Someone to Say Yes

Behind every LOI is a person, a program officer reviewing dozens, sometimes hundreds, of submissions, who will eventually have to summarize your organization to a room full of colleagues and make the case for why you deserve an invitation to submit a full proposal.

Help them do that.

Write with enough clarity that someone could explain your work in two or three sentences after reading your LOI once. A reviewer should finish reading and immediately understand what problem you are addressing, why your organization is uniquely positioned to address it, what you are

proposing, and what success looks like.

If they have to read it twice to get there, the positioning needs work.

The Letter of Intent is the Beginning

The organizations that consistently receive invitations to submit full proposals are the ones that make it easiest for a funder to see the fit. You do not need to reshape your organization to earn a seat at the table. You need to position the organization you have already built so clearly that the right funders cannot miss it.

The LOI is where that positioning begins. Treat it like it matters because it is the first thing standing between your work and the resources it deserves.