Throughout my eight years as a nonprofit fundraiser, I sent many inquiries each year to family foundations and the majority earned no response at all. When I did receive responses, most were postal letters that followed a vapid, impersonal, and uninformative generations-old template. Family foundation fundraising felt like talking to so many cold brick walls.

When I transitioned to working as foundation staff, I hoped to avoid inflicting that feeling on anybody else. We decline the vast majority of inquiries, but can we turn away these inquiries with a little more humanity, clarity, and accountability? To that end, I hope that my simple email template for declining letters of inquiry (LOIs) may be helpful to some foundation staff.

Here is the text of a standard letter we send to nonprofits who submit an LOI that we do not invite to submit a full proposal.  In order to facilitate annotation, each section of the email below is numbered within a table. It wasn’t presented this way originally, of course. This example is brief, yet several applicants called it out as exceptional, and they generously took time to send us positive input.

The trend toward trust-based philanthropy is a good thing. While many foundations now enjoy and value building trust-based relationships with funded nonprofits, we act like we don’t trust declined applicants at all. I think we can do better. I’ve shared a few simple improvements that we achieve at the L.B. Foundation with one half-time staff person. These practices can surely be scaled up and improved further, while following the same basic principles:

  • Humanity: communicate person to person while also sharing the broader foundation’s values, practices, and personnel;
  • Clarity: avoid offering inauthentic reasons for decline such as “we received many great inquiries;” provide real reasons;
  • Accountability: don’t try to cut off the possibility of a response or clarifying exchange; stay open to the idea that we can learn from declined applicants’ input. From what we learn, we can periodically refine our published priorities.

What Next?

Most family foundation declination letters lack transparency, avoid open disclosure, and seem rooted in fear: fear of further communication; fear of complaint; fear of liability; and fear that the declined applicant will want to pursue any relationship at all. This is one practice that is easy to improve and a small step toward being better partners with the communities we support. Surely, some of you have much greater capacity and are demonstrating best practices with declined applicants that go far beyond an extra sentence or two in the notification letter. I’m excited to learn more.

Read the full article about how funders can write better declination letters by Peter Marks at the National Center for Family Philanthropy.