Funder intelligence briefs

Funder intelligence needs Org plan.

A brief is the platform’s analysis of a single funding opportunity in relation to your organisation. It is intended to answer, without requiring a full reading of the guidelines, whether the opportunity merits the effort of an application.

What a brief contains

Five sections, each addressing a different question:

Section	Answers
Eligibility check	Whether the organisation is eligible, and where the guidelines are silent
Funder DNA	What the funder has funded in practice, as distinct from its stated priorities
Competitive reality	The likely applicant field
Strategic angle	The framing most likely to succeed with this funder
Red flags	Factors that would make an application unproductive

Each brief also carries a verdict, a score and the deadline, which is what the list is sorted and filtered on.

Read the red flags first. The section exists because the costlier error is not an unsuccessful application but a substantial effort spent on one for which the organisation was never eligible.

Briefs are generated analysis

A brief is generated from the call, the organisation profile and known information about the funder. It can be incorrect, particularly where the funder’s guidelines are imprecise.

Two mechanisms address this:

Community notes. A brief can be annotated by category for the benefit of subsequent applicants. Information learned during an application that the guidelines did not state belongs here.

Corrections. Where the analysis is incorrect, submit a correction rather than working around it.

Regenerate re-runs the analysis. This is appropriate when the call has been updated or the organisation profile has changed substantially, as the brief is written against both.

Decisions and the pipeline

Every brief carries a decision, and there are only three states:

Decision	Means
Unset	Not yet assessed — the default
Shortlisted	Intended for pursuit
Dismissed	Assessed and declined

Dismissal is a recorded decision and should be used. An unset brief and a dismissed one are indistinguishable in a total but represent opposite states: one is a decision, the other is an outstanding item.

Shortlisting also moves a brief into the fundraising pipeline shown at the top of the page:

Analysed → Shortlisted → Drafting → Submitted → Won / Lost

The fundraising pipeline — briefs and proposals counted by stageOpen /a/briefs in the app

×

The first two stages are brief states; the remainder derive from the proposals written against them. Win rate and conversion are computed from the same chain, and are therefore only as accurate as the recorded outcomes.

Funder intelligenceFunding → Briefs