Open versus invitation-only applications
What’s the difference?
At the Freedom Fund, we tend to favour invite-only processes because most of the organisations we fund aren’t necessarily able to put their best foot forward with a written application alone. We also want to avoid wasting the time of organisations that clearly aren’t going to be a fit for the focus of our grants.
We tend to prefer processes where we can go back and forth multiple times with a potential grantee to help them refine their proposal, and we would only do so with those we are very serious about funding. Of course, there are exceptions – we would consider doing open processes in consultation with certain donors, particularly where government donors require this as a condition of their funding, or when we feel that the pool of potential partners on our radar is not broad enough.