Funder Research and Prospect Screening

Most wasted grant effort is spent on applications that were never eligible, and the cause is usually enthusiasm standing in for screening. Funder research done properly is a filtering discipline: hard gates first, fit scoring second, and a recorded reason behind every funder you pursue, hold or drop, so the same research never has to be repeated from scratch.

This cluster carries that discipline as working instruments. The eligibility matrix screens one funder through six pass-or-fail gates before any scoring happens, and it fails closed: a gate you have not checked is not a gate you passed. The matrix itself is a free download, with the weights and thresholds published so the scoring can be argued with before it is used, not after.

Screening decides where proposal effort goes, which makes this cluster the practical start of the whole application sequence. Once a funder survives the gates, proposal development covers the documents, and budgets and compliance covers the submission. The Funder Prospect Research Tracker runs this same published model across a 200-row register in one file, and the course teaches the research method behind the gates.