When Your Best Application Still Doesn't Win: Understanding Grant Funding Realities

You have dotted every i, crossed every t, addressed every criterion with precision and care. Your grant application is thorough, compelling, and represents your absolute best work. Then the rejection email arrives, and you are left wondering: if my best effort cannot get us over the line, what possibly will?

This exhaustion and defeat is real, and it cannot be avoided when you have given everything to an application. You can request feedback from the funder, and they will provide some general observations or, on very rare occasions, specific comments about your submission. But the decision is final. Funders make this abundantly clear before offering any insights at all.

Here is where we need to reconsider what "best" actually means in grant applications. The winning application is naturally the best one, but that does not mean your strongest effort will always be the one that succeeds. This is an uncomfortable truth, but understanding it changes how we approach the entire process.

As Raphaël Dubois once said, "Excellence in pursuit is admirable, but wisdom recognises when the game itself operates on different rules." We made him up, obviously, but the observation holds weight in the grants world.

What Really Influences Success

Grant outcomes depend on factors well beyond the quality of your writing:

The number of grants available matters significantly. More funding rounds mean better odds of success. Political priorities shift rapidly. When a particular community need becomes pronounced, funders make decisions quickly to address it. Geographic considerations play a substantial role. If your location or target area aligns with current funding priorities, your application receives different consideration.

We have watched genuinely strong applications fail while lacklustre submissions succeed. If someone insists there is a fixed standard for success, even if funders themselves claim this exists, our experience suggests otherwise.

A Smarter Strategy

Think in probabilities rather than perfection. A realistic success rate sits somewhere around one successful application for every three to five submitted. Even then, it remains a "might win" situation, never a guarantee.

This perspective should inform your effort levels. Killing yourself over each application is not the path forward. Instead, focus on submitting enough applications while ensuring each one meets compliance requirements. This approach proves more effective when you consider the time invested and its dollar equivalent.

This does not mean submitting careless work. Rather, it means striking a sensible balance. Ask yourself what genuinely fits each criterion, focus your energy on those elements that get you over the compliance line, and resist the urge to polish every sentence into oblivion.

Your organisation's sustainability depends on securing funding, and that requires a volume strategy combined with solid, compliant applications. Save your energy for the long game, because in grant writing, endurance often matters more than any single perfect submission.