Five minutes that save you three weeks
How do I quickly tell if my organization is eligible for a grant?
Read four things, in this order, before you read anything else. The eligible applicants section, which is usually short and usually decisive. The cost sharing requirement, because a match you cannot document is a wall rather than an inconvenience. The registration requirements, because an active SAM.gov registration takes weeks and no deadline waits for it. And the geographic or population restrictions, which are frequently a single clause in the middle of a paragraph about something else. If all four pass, then read the announcement properly. If any one fails, you have saved yourself the three weeks it would have taken to find out at the end.
Last reviewed 10 August 2026.
The order to read in
Eligible applicants, first and always
Federal announcements state applicant types explicitly and the categories are narrower than people expect. Many are open only to state and local governments, or only to institutions of higher education, or only to 501(c)(3) organizations. This section is short, it is unambiguous, and it decides more applications than anything else in the document.
Cost share, second
A 20% match on a $500,000 project is $100,000 you have to document, and other federal money almost never counts. If you cannot evidence it, this is not a stretch goal, it is a disqualification you discover at the end.
Registrations, third
SAM.gov and a UEI take weeks and entity validation stalls on a name mismatch. Some state portals have their own queue on top. If the deadline is in eleven days and you are not registered, that decision is already made.
Restrictions on geography and population, fourth
The most easily missed of the four, because it is rarely its own section. It appears as a clause inside a paragraph about priorities, and it is the reason otherwise strong applications get screened out before review.
Why this order and not the announcement's
Announcements are written in the order the agency thinks about the programme, which puts the vision first and the constraints later. That is the opposite of the order you need. The expensive mistake is not losing a competition, it is spending three weeks on something you were never permitted to enter.
Reading for disqualification first feels pessimistic and is the opposite. It means the announcements you do read properly are the ones you could actually win, and you read them with the time you did not waste on the others.
Where Quillify comes in
Every opportunity carries an eligibility line on the card before you open anything, and “Am I qualified?” reads the real announcement rather than a portal summary and tells you where you stand, in about three credits.
That is the same four checks above, done against the actual document, in the time it takes to read this sentence.
Who asks this most
The answer above is the same whoever you are. What Quillify does about it is not.
Related
- How to read a funding announcementHow do I read a NOFO or funding announcement properly?
- Who can actually apply for grantsCan my type of organization apply for grants?
- Cost share and matching fundsWhat does a matching funds or cost share requirement actually mean?
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