Hi everyone, with the collapse of the Afghanistan government, the devastating earthquake in Haiti, and the worsening pandemic, you might be thinking there are more important things to talk about than something as insignificant as character limits on grant proposals. I am writing about it because I need something concrete that I can focus on. But also, because minor things like character limits are symptomatic of some serious issues in philanthropy.

“Describe the program for which you are applying and how it helps to fight racial disparities in health care or food insecurity. Share whether this is a new or existing program. Provide specific data-driven information that shows a clear understanding of what the need in your community is. (700 characters).”

I wish I had made that up. But no, a colleague sent that to me just a couple of weeks ago, an excerpt from a grant application. 700 characters is fewer than 3 tweets. Here are some common problems around character limits:

  • Funders ask for a laughable amount of information, and expect it to be presented with an unrealistically small character limit, forcing applicants to spend endless time editing, checking, editing, checking.
  • Funders don’t disclose character limits, but they exist, and only when the proposal writer submits are they told that they exceeded the limits and must go back and edit. Some of these online portals don’t tell you what the limits are, they just tell you it’s over the limit so it’s a matter of trial and error to figure out the limit for every question.
  • Funders have ridiculously large character limits (10,000 characters), and applicants feel like they will be judged inadequate if they don’t hit those numbers. It reminds many of us of school, when we had to write a 5-page paper but only had 3 pages of content and had to try all sorts of tricks to fill out the rest of the pages.

Read the full article about character limits on grant applications by Vu Le at Nonprofit AF.