What to have ready before you need it
What documents do I need to apply for a grant?
Nearly every application wants the same core set: proof of legal status, a recent financial statement and budget, a board list, an organizational description, and a project budget with narrative. Larger funders add audited financials, a logic model or evaluation plan, letters of commitment from partners, and key staff biographies. Assembling these once, properly, converts every future application from a fortnight into a few days, and it is the highest-return unglamorous work in this field.
Last reviewed 6 August 2026.
The core set
- Proof of legal status
- IRS determination letter, incorporation certificate, or the fiscal sponsorship agreement. Keep a current copy where you can find it in a minute, not in a drawer.
- Organizational budget and most recent financials
- The whole organization, not the project. Funders read this to size you: an organization asking for a grant larger than its annual budget is telling a story it needs to address directly, and not hope goes unnoticed.
- Board list
- Names, affiliations, roles. Sometimes with terms and a conflict of interest policy attached.
- Organizational description and history
- The paragraph everybody rewrites from scratch every time. Write it once at three lengths, roughly 100, 300 and 800 words, and you will use all three within a year.
- Project budget with a narrative
- Line items with a justification for each. The narrative is the part reviewers actually read, and unexplained round numbers read as invented because they usually are.
What larger funders add
- Audited financial statements
- The most common hard gate for small organizations. If you do not have an audit, a review engagement plus a filed 990 opens a great deal of funding, and the audit itself becomes worth its cost only above a certain scale of pursuit.
- Evaluation plan or logic model
- How you will know whether it worked. The failure mode is proposing a measurement apparatus far heavier than the grant funds, which reviewers read as unserious.
- Letters of commitment, not support
- A commitment names what the partner will do and what it is worth. A support letter says the project sounds good. Funders can tell instantly and weigh them completely differently.
- Key staff biographies
- Short, focused on relevance to this project. A federal biosketch has a mandated format; foundations mostly want three sentences.
- Indirect cost rate agreement
- If you have negotiated one. If you have not, know what the de minimis rate is and whether the funder allows it.
The compounding part
Every document above gets reused. The organization that assembles them deliberately applies for four times as much as the one reassembling them under deadline pressure, and the applications are better, because the time goes into the argument instead of into finding a PDF.
This is also why Quillify drafts from your own document room, not from a description. What is in there is the raw material, so the more of it exists, the less every future proposal costs in effort and in credits.
Who asks this most
The answer above is the same whoever you are. What Quillify does about it is not.
Related
- Is your organization ready to apply for grants?What does my organization need before it can apply for grants?
- Reading a foundation's tax returnWhat can I learn from a foundation's 990-PF?
- The vocabulary, defined plainlyWhat do all these grant terms mean?
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