Time
2 minutes
Ten questions across four lenses — Frame, Substance, Trust, Story — to surface where your model communicates clearly and where funders will reach for the back button. No email required. Your answers stay in this browser.
Can a smart non-expert read your homepage and articulate the specific problem you solve in two sentences?
Generic statements like ‘we work on women’s empowerment’ fail this. What good looks like: a named population, a named friction, a measurable status quo.
Is there an explicit chain of inputs → activities → outputs → outcomes anywhere on your site or one-pager?
A theory of change names the mechanism by which change happens. Most NGOs have one implicitly; few make it visible. Funders look for it first.
Are your actual interventions described with enough specificity that another organisation could replicate the day-to-day work?
“We train teachers” is too vague. “We run a 14-week residential cohort with weekly cluster meetings, fortnightly observation, and a paired mentor” is specific. Specificity reads as competence.
Are your interventions visibly tied to research, prior evaluations, or a clearly stated rationale?
Either external (peer-reviewed studies, sector evidence) or internal (your own MEL data). The gap most often shows up as confident claims without footnotes.
Does your impact reporting lead with outcomes (changes in lives), not outputs (people trained, sessions held)?
Activity counts answer ‘what did you do’. Outcomes answer ‘what changed.’ Reverse the order on every public-facing surface.
Can you point to one or two specific mechanisms that make your model replicable beyond its current geography?
Funders evaluating institutional grants need to see scale logic, not just current footprint. Cost per outcome, replicable training kit, technology lever, partnership template — these are the markers.
Are independent evaluations, named partners, named funders, and public data visible within one click?
Credibility markers should be on the homepage, not buried in a downloads tab. Logos of named partners + a single audited number do more work than a thousand-word ‘About’.
Could you send a foundation programme officer a 10-page concept note tomorrow without writing a new word?
Logic model, MEL plan, cost structure, governance, audit. If these don’t already exist as documents, you’re not funder-ready — you’re funder-curious.
Across your site, deck, and last three reports — does the story rhyme, or do three different voices tell three different stories?
Coherence is a credibility signal. If your annual report sounds different from your homepage which sounds different from your CEO’s LinkedIn, funders read instability.
Is the next step for an interested funder, partner, or hire obvious within five seconds of landing on your site?
‘Donate’ is rarely the right primary CTA for institutional funders. The right ask is usually ‘download the model brief’ or ‘book a 30-min orientation’.