Funders and grant-makers
The pressure is real. But if it is treated only as an assessment-capacity issue, we may end up solving the wrong problem.
← All four pressuresFoundations and grant-makers are facing a difficult combination: rising need, resources that have not grown at the same pace, and more applications arriving faster than established processes were designed to handle.
Generative AI has accelerated the change. It helps applicants research opportunities and produce credible applications in far less time. It can also make good writing easier to produce, and therefore less useful as a signal of good work.
The obvious response is to make the queue move faster: tighter eligibility, another screening stage, more automated assessment, shorter windows, or closing programmes while capacity catches up.
Any of those may be sensible.
But each begins after a more important question.
What if the pressure is exposing the system rather than simply overwhelming it?
The application surge did not create the grant-making model. It has made its assumptions harder to ignore.
How much does the quality of an application really tell us about an organisation’s ability to deliver? Are we rewarding the organisations doing the strongest work, or those best equipped to describe it? What behaviours do short funding cycles, restricted grants and competitive processes encourage? Are the measures used to demonstrate accountability also shaping delivery in ways nobody intended?
And when we make one part of the system more efficient, where does the pressure migrate to?
A tighter process may reduce work for assessors while increasing work for applicants. Additional filters may control volume while excluding smaller organisations with less fundraising capacity. Automation may improve speed and consistency, but it cannot tell you whether the criteria are the right ones.
That is not an argument against efficiency.
It is an argument for deciding what good looks like before optimising for it.
Goodway Advisory starts one step earlier. Before redesigning a form, adding a filter or selecting a technology, we look at the whole funding system and ask:
There is no predetermined answer. Sometimes it points to better technology or more automation. Sometimes to a shorter application, different triage, different measures or longer-term funding.
And sometimes it points somewhere less comfortable. If a well-written application now tells you less about an organisation than it used to, the value of direct human contact rises rather than falls. That costs time precisely when capacity is stretched. So, the question becomes whether the system should be designed so that scarce human attention is spent where it changes the decision.
Sometimes the existing model will prove sound and simply need more capacity. The point is to find out before changing it.
Goodway Advisory is not a grant-management software provider. We have no platform that the diagnosis needs to justify. Our role is to give an independent view of the system: what it is trying to achieve, what it is producing, where its costs and pressures are landing, and what a better-designed alternative could look like.
That view is informed by fifteen years leading frontline delivery and living with the consequences of funding decisions from the recipient side of the table. It brings a different question into the room: not only how you process this better, but what the change will mean for the organisations expected to make the funding work.
A first conversation costs nothing and takes half an hour: enough to establish whether there is a real decision to be made, who owns it, and whether we are the right help. If not, you will be told so.
Only then do we scope the work. It usually takes the shape of an Application Pressure Diagnostic: a bounded piece of work at a fixed fee agreed before it starts, ending in a meeting where the findings go to the people who can act on them and a decision is taken.
If application volume has forced you to pause, narrow or rethink, this may be more than an operational problem. It may be a rare chance to examine the whole system while change is already unavoidable.
The question is not simply how to get through more applications.
It is whether the system on the other side of this pressure should be the same one you had before it.