I don’t completely agree: grantmaking organizations shouldn’t issue grant intent letters which imply this level of certainty before completing their evaluation. I expect one outcome here will be that FLI changes how they phrase letters they send at this stage to be clearer about what they actually represent, and this will be a good thing on its own where it helps grantees better understand where they are in the process and how confident to be about incoming funds.
I’m also not convinced that the stage at which this was caught is the stage at which their process was intended to catch it, but that wouldn’t rise to the level of doing something wrong—it would be small internal mistake if it hadn’t been for the misleading letter.
Apparently FLI doesn’t usually issue letters of intent at all, but the grantee requested it in this case.
Separate from the letter, there’s a question of whether more vetting should occur at an earlier stage of FLI’s process — either to save time and effort on FLI’s part, or to avoid sending a bunch of grantees informal emails that get their hopes up, or because the overall amount of vetting in the process might be too low (even though in principle it could be that FLI is doing normal levels of vetting and just spacing it out weirdly).
I don’t completely agree: grantmaking organizations shouldn’t issue grant intent letters which imply this level of certainty before completing their evaluation. I expect one outcome here will be that FLI changes how they phrase letters they send at this stage to be clearer about what they actually represent, and this will be a good thing on its own where it helps grantees better understand where they are in the process and how confident to be about incoming funds.
I’m also not convinced that the stage at which this was caught is the stage at which their process was intended to catch it, but that wouldn’t rise to the level of doing something wrong—it would be small internal mistake if it hadn’t been for the misleading letter.
Apparently FLI doesn’t usually issue letters of intent at all, but the grantee requested it in this case.
Separate from the letter, there’s a question of whether more vetting should occur at an earlier stage of FLI’s process — either to save time and effort on FLI’s part, or to avoid sending a bunch of grantees informal emails that get their hopes up, or because the overall amount of vetting in the process might be too low (even though in principle it could be that FLI is doing normal levels of vetting and just spacing it out weirdly).