The Letter of Inquiry

A letter of inquiry is a short preliminary submission by which a funder decides whether to invite a full proposal. It states the ask in the opening paragraph, sizes the problem, describes the project, and shows the organization can run it — in one to three pages, before either side has spent real time.

Current figures — verified 2026-08-11

Item	Value	Source
Letters of inquiry declined per proposal invited, Tinker Foundation	75 to 100	Tinker Foundation
Letters of inquiry received per cycle, Tinker Foundation	Approximately 1,400	Tinker Foundation
Declined applicants who requested feedback and received it	47% (n=203, 56% response rate)	St. David’s Foundation 2025 declined applicant survey
First-time inquiries leading to a full proposal request, one family foundation	About 10% of roughly 70 per quarter	NCFP
Recommended maximum letter of inquiry length	No more than three pages	Candid

These figures change. Verify against the linked source before relying on them. Report an outdated figure

Key takeaways

• A letter of inquiry exists to save both sides the cost of a full proposal.
• The amount belongs in the first paragraph, not the last page.
• Federal letters of intent are advisory; preliminary proposals can be binding.
• An LOI decline is usually about fit, not quality.
• Most declined applicants never ask why, and many who ask never hear back.

What is a letter of inquiry?

A letter of inquiry, commonly shortened to LOI, is a brief written request that a private funder uses to screen for fit before inviting a full proposal. It runs one to three pages or fits a short online form, and it either advances to a full proposal or ends the pursuit. Some foundations decide the grant itself from the letter, without a full proposal stage at all (Candid).

The LOI sits before the work described in writing the proposal, which is precisely the point. Candid’s guidance frames it as a document that must “thoroughly present the need or problem you have identified, the proposed solution, and your organization’s qualifications for implementing that solution,” and adds a warning practitioners recognize: “An effective LOI is often more difficult to write than a full proposal” (Candid).

The economics explain why funders use them. Screening at the LOI stage costs a program officer minutes and costs the applicant a few hours, against days on each side for a full proposal. The Tinker Foundation, which publishes its numbers, reports a cycle volume in the low thousands and declines dozens of letters for every proposal it invites; the figures above give the ratio (Tinker Foundation). At that ratio, an inquiry process that filtered nothing would consume the program staff entirely.

Smaller funders run the same mechanic at smaller scale. One family foundation described its process to the National Center for Family Philanthropy as an emailed concept paper of a few hundred words, arriving by the dozen each quarter from first-time applicants, of which only a small share lead to a request for a full proposal (NCFP); the conversion rate appears in the figures above.

How does a letter of inquiry differ from a concept paper or a pre-proposal?

A letter of inquiry differs from adjacent documents in who asks for it and what the response decides. The five labels are often used loosely, but the consequences are not interchangeable: one of them can end eligibility to apply at all.

The table below distinguishes the five preliminary documents an applicant is most likely to encounter.

Document	Who asks for it	What the response decides
Letter of inquiry	Private and community foundations	Whether a full proposal is invited
Concept paper	Foundations, some agencies	Whether an idea is worth developing
Preliminary proposal	Federal agencies, notably NSF	Sometimes eligibility to submit at all
Letter of intent	Federal agencies	Nothing binding; helps plan review
Query letter	Funders without a formal process	Whether to send anything at all

The practical distinction is between screening documents and planning documents. A letter of inquiry, concept paper, and preliminary proposal are all screened on content. A letter of intent typically is not; it exists so the agency can estimate workload and recruit reviewers.

A query letter deserves separate mention because it is the shortest and most misused form. It is three to five sentences asking one closed-ended question — whether a request in a stated range for a stated purpose would fall within the funder’s current interests. A query letter that asks the funder to explain its priorities signals that the applicant has not read them.

What goes in a letter of inquiry?

A letter of inquiry contains seven parts in a fixed order, and the order matters more than the prose. Program officers triage; a request whose amount appears on the last page is read as a request that was not thought through.

Candid’s structure covers an introduction that functions as an executive summary, an organization description, a statement of need, a methodology, other funding sources being approached, and a closing summary (Candid). The table below assigns a word budget to each part for a letter of roughly 800 words, which fits comfortably inside a two-page limit.

Section	Words	What it must contain
Opening ask	60–90	Organization, amount, duration, support type, purpose in one line
Fit statement	40–70	Explicit link to the funder’s stated priority or a named prior grant
Need	120–180	Population, geography, and two numbers with a gap between them
Project	200–300	Activities, who delivers them, measurable objectives, timeline
Evidence of capability	100–150	One or two outcomes with numbers; staff and budget size
Budget and other funders	60–100	Total project cost, amount requested, other sources by status
Close	30–50	Named contact, offer to supply detail, thanks

Three drafting rules apply across all seven sections. Write the need as a documented community condition rather than the absence of your program, the same discipline described in writing a statement of need. Name the fit in the funder’s own terms once, without flattery, and without spending words restating their priorities back to them — a program officer quoted by NCFP identified exactly that failure: “the writer uses a lot of space to just restate the wording of our priorities, leaving little room to tell us what they do and why” (NCFP). And attach nothing the funder did not request.

Why does naming the amount matter in a letter of inquiry?

Naming the amount matters because the amount determines whether the request is reviewable at all. A program officer reading an LOI is deciding, among other things, whether the request fits the foundation’s grant range, its available budget, and its board’s tolerance. An LOI without a number cannot be triaged and gets returned or set aside.

Candid places the amount in the introduction, alongside the organization name and project description, treating it as part of the executive summary rather than a conclusion (Candid). Tinker lists among its published decline reasons that “the resources required exceed Tinker’s funding guidelines or appear to be mismatched with the project activities” — a judgment that requires an amount to make (Tinker Foundation).

Three related decisions belong in the same paragraph as the number. State the duration, because a request for the same amount over one year and over three years describes different projects. State the support type — general operating support or project support — because funders treat those differently and some will convert one to the other if asked. And state the total project cost alongside the request, so the funder can see what share of the whole they are being asked to carry.

The amount should come from the funder’s actual giving history rather than from the organization’s need. Prior grants are visible in a private foundation’s Form 990-PF, which lists grants paid with amounts and recipients. An ask far above a funder’s typical grant is a research failure that the amount makes visible in the first paragraph.

Is a letter of inquiry the right channel?

A letter of inquiry is the right channel only when the funder says so. Sending an unsolicited LOI to a foundation that does not accept unsolicited requests is not persistence; it is a diligence failure the program officer will notice, and it costs the relationship you were trying to open.

Private foundations disclose their posture in two places. The website states the process, and Form 990-PF carries a checkbox for foundations that “only make contributions to preselected charitable organizations and do not accept unsolicited requests for funds” (IRS Form 990-PF). A foundation that has checked that box has a board-controlled, invitation-only pipeline, and the useful route is a warm introduction from a current grantee or trustee rather than a submission.

Four channel questions should be settled before drafting:

1. Does the funder accept unsolicited requests at all? Website language and the 990-PF checkbox both answer this.
2. Is an LOI required, optional, or unwelcome? Some funders require an LOI, some accept full proposals directly, and some accept neither without an invitation.
3. What is the submission mechanism and deadline? Portal, email, or postal mail, and whether there are rolling or fixed cycles.
4. What is the grant range and the geographic scope? An organization outside the funder’s geography is declined regardless of quality.

Answering those four questions is a funder research task rather than a writing task, and doing it badly wastes the writing.

What are the federal analogues to a letter of inquiry?

Federal agencies use two documents that resemble a letter of inquiry and behave very differently from each other. A letter of intent is advisory. A preliminary proposal can determine eligibility to submit a full application at all.

NSF describes the letter of intent as “not a binding document,” whose “predominant reason for its use is to help NSF program staff gauge the size and range of the competition, enabling earlier selection and better management of reviewers and panelists,” and which “is not externally evaluated or used to decide on funding.” NSF adds the compliance trap: “Failure to submit a required LOI identified in a program solicitation will result in a full proposal not being accepted or returned without review” (NSF PAPPG Chapter I).

NSF preliminary proposals carry more weight. Solicitations specify one of two decision types: invite or not invite, where “the NSF decision made on the preliminary proposal is final, affecting the organization’s eligibility to submit a full proposal,” or encourage or discourage, which is advisory (NSF PAPPG Chapter I). A proposal submitted after a “not invited” response is grounds for return without review (NSF PAPPG Chapter IV).

NIH’s letter of intent was always the advisory kind. NIMH’s description states that “although a letter of intent is not required, is not binding, and does not enter into the review of a subsequent application, the information that it contains allows Institute/Center staff to estimate the potential review workload and plan the review” (NIMH). NIH subsequently removed the mechanism from its application process as an administrative burden reduction, stating that “an LOI was never required, binding, nor considered during the peer review process” (NIH Guide Notice NOT-OD-26-019). The instruction for applicants is unchanged in substance: read the notice of funding opportunity, and treat any preliminary submission it names as a compliance requirement rather than an option.

What happens after you send a letter of inquiry?

After a letter of inquiry is sent, the applicant waits on the funder’s stated timeline and does nothing else. Foundations typically respond in weeks to a few months, and cycles are usually tied to board meeting calendars rather than to when the LOI arrived.

Follow-up etiquette is narrow. Send nothing for the duration the funder states. If no timeline is published, a single short note after roughly eight weeks is reasonable, asking only whether the letter was received and when decisions are expected. Do not attach new material, do not send a revised version, and do not copy a trustee.

An invitation to submit a full proposal changes the relationship rather than the argument. Everything in the LOI must survive into the proposal unchanged in substance, because a program officer who advocated internally based on the LOI will notice a scope or budget that shifted. The full proposal expands the same claims with evidence, budget detail, and the sections described in the anatomy of a grant proposal.

An invitation is also the moment to ask questions, since the funder has signaled interest and the conversation is now welcome. Useful questions concern the realistic range for a first grant, the internal timeline before the board meets, and what most often keeps proposals in this area from advancing.

What does a decline at the letter of inquiry stage tell you?

A decline at the letter of inquiry stage most often means fit, not quality — and the applicant usually cannot tell which without asking. Tinker’s first listed decline reason is that a request was “aligned with Tinker’s program priorities and proposing a meaningful contribution” but that “other projects offered a stronger fit and/or potential for impact” (Tinker Foundation). That is a decline containing no diagnostic information about the letter.

Asking is worth doing and frequently unrewarded. Sophisticated funders treat the declined-applicant relationship as something to measure, which is why the Center for Effective Philanthropy offers applicant-side assessments alongside its Grantee Perception Report. St. David’s Foundation, surveying declined applicants with the Center for Effective Philanthropy, found that fewer than half of those who requested feedback received it, and that the honesty with which decline reasons were shared scored lowest of anything in the survey against CEP’s cross-funder norms (St. David’s Foundation); the figures appear above.

One question separates the outcomes that matter: was the decline about fit, timing, or the funder’s own capacity? Fit means re-qualify or drop the prospect. Timing or capacity means the work was acceptable and the pursuit stays in the pipeline with a date. Those three answers lead to completely different next actions, and none of them is arguing with the decision. Further handling of declines is covered in what to do when a grant is declined.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a letter of inquiry be?

Follow the funder’s limit exactly. Where none is stated, Candid recommends no more than three pages, and two pages is a safer working target because it forces the compression that makes an LOI readable. Online forms often impose character counts far shorter than either, and those counts are enforced by the form. Candid publishes sample letters of inquiry that show how the compression works in practice.

Should a letter of inquiry include attachments?

Only what the funder requests. Candid’s guidance is explicit that attachments should be included only if asked for, and that any stated guidelines for attachments should be followed. Unrequested budgets, annual reports, and letters of support signal that the applicant did not read the instructions, which is the first thing an LOI is screened for.

Can you send the same letter of inquiry to several foundations?

The structure can be reused; the fit statement and the amount cannot. Each funder’s stated priorities, grant range, and geography differ, and a letter that reads as generic is declined on responsiveness. Reusing the need and project sections while rewriting the opening ask and fit paragraph is normal practice.

How long does a foundation take to respond to a letter of inquiry?

Response times vary from a few weeks to several months and are usually governed by board meeting schedules rather than by submission date. Published guidelines generally state the window. Silence past a stated window justifies one short status inquiry, not a resubmission.

Is a letter of intent the same as a letter of inquiry?

No. A letter of inquiry is a screening document that determines whether a foundation invites a proposal. A federal letter of intent is an administrative notice that helps an agency plan peer review and is not evaluated. The two share initials and almost nothing else, and confusing them produces the wrong document.

What if the funder’s LOI form has no field for the amount?

Put the amount in the project description or the closing sentence of the summary field. A form that omits the field has not signaled that the amount is unwelcome, and a request whose size a program officer has to guess is harder to advance internally. If a hard character limit forces a cut, cut organizational history before cutting the number.

Related topics

• Writing the Proposal — the hub covering what each proposal section is asked to prove
• The Abstract and Project Summary
• Demonstrating Organizational Capacity
• Foundation Grants
• Community Foundations and Donor-Advised Funds

Sources

1. Candid, “What should be included in a letter of inquiry?” Candid Learning. https://learning.candid.org/what-to-include-in-letters-of-inquiry (accessed 2026-08-11)
2. Candid, “Four common grant proposal documents (free samples included),” February 3, 2025. https://candid.org/blogs/four-common-examples-grant-proposal-documents-free-samples-included/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
3. Candid, “Letters of inquiry — sample documents.” https://learning.candid.org/letters-of-inquiry (accessed 2026-08-11)
4. Tinker Foundation, “Why Was My Letter of Inquiry Declined?” https://tinker.org/why-was-my-letter-of-inquiry-declined/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
5. National Center for Family Philanthropy, “Declining Applications and Inquiries: How Funders Can Do Better,” March 6, 2024. https://www.ncfp.org/blog/declining-applications-and-inquiries-how-funders-can-do-better (accessed 2026-08-11)
6. St. David’s Foundation, “Listening, Learning, and Growing: Insights from Our 2025 Declined Grant Applicant Survey,” March 3, 2026. https://stdavidsfoundation.org/research-and-insights/2025-declined-grant-applicant-survey/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
7. Center for Effective Philanthropy, Grantee Perception Report. https://cep.org/services/assessments/grantee-perception-report/ (accessed 2026-08-11)
8. U.S. National Science Foundation, Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (NSF 24-1), Chapter I: Pre-Submission Information. https://www.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/ch-1-pre-submission (accessed 2026-08-11)
9. U.S. National Science Foundation, Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (NSF 24-1), Chapter IV: Non-Award Decisions and Transactions. https://www.nsf.gov/policies/pappg/24-1/ch-4-non-award-decisions-transactions (accessed 2026-08-11)
10. National Institute of Mental Health, “Letter of Intent.” https://www.nimh.nih.gov/funding/grant-writing-and-application-process/letter-of-intent (accessed 2026-08-11)
11. National Institutes of Health, “Updated Application Policies: NIH Administrative Burden Reduction Effort — Removal of Requirements for Letters of Intent and Unsolicited Applications Requesting $500,000 or More in Direct Costs,” Guide Notice NOT-OD-26-019, December 3, 2025. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-26-019.html (accessed 2026-08-11)
12. Internal Revenue Service, Form 990-PF, Return of Private Foundation. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f990pf.pdf (accessed 2026-08-11)