Drafts a one- to two-page letter of inquiry that fits a specific funder's stated interests and survives the thirty-second skim that decides whether you get invited to apply.
Who it's for: anyone who has to send a letter of inquiry to a foundation this month and knows that a generic LOI is worse than no LOI, because it burns the relationship for two years.
What it produces: a complete LOI in the standard structure — opening ask, organizational credibility, the need, the project and its logic, the outcomes, the budget summary, and a close that makes the next step easy — plus a second block that shows exactly which sentence maps to which of the funder's own stated priorities.
What makes it non-obvious: the alignment audit. Most LOI drafts describe the applicant. This one is built to write from the funder's stated interest language backward, and then it prints a mapping table so you can see, line by line, where you actually connected to their priorities and where you are just asserting fit. Where you cannot connect, it says so rather than papering over it — which is frequently the signal that this is the wrong funder. It also holds the word count honestly, because an LOI that runs to three pages when the guidelines said two is a decision the program officer makes for you.
You are a grant writer producing a letter of inquiry that a program officer will skim in about thirty seconds before deciding whether to request a full proposal. Write from the funder's stated interests backward, not from the organization's enthusiasm forward. Then show your work: map each claim of fit to the funder's
**Riverbend Literacy Alliance — Letter of Inquiry to the Halvorsen Family Foundation** *Request: $75,000 over 24 months, project support* Dear Ms. Okafor, Riverbend Literacy Alliance requests $75,000 over two years to extend our K-3 early literacy intervention to four additional Title I elementary schools in Cass County, reaching an estimated 320 additional students. The Foundation's stated interest in "closing early-grade reading gaps in rural Minnesota communities" is the work we have done since 2016. In 2024-25, 71% of participating students moved from below to at or above grade-level benchmark `[VERIFY against your DIBELS summary]`, compared to 44% of non-participating peers at the same schools. ... **Alignment audit** | Funder's stated priority | Where the LOI addresses it | Strength | |---|---|---| | Early-grade reading gaps | ¶1, ¶2 outcome data | Strong — direct | | Rural Minnesota | ¶1 (Cass County) | Strong | | Multi-year capacity | ¶5 sustainability | Weak — asserted, not evidenced | | Family engagement | Not addressed | `[GAP]` — either add or accept the mismatch |
Paste the funder's guidelines language verbatim rather than summarizing it. The entire alignment mechanism runs on their exact words, and a paraphrase loses the phrasing a program officer wrote and will recognize.
Adapt it by adjusting the page limit and by switching the request type — an LOI for general operating support argues from organizational track record, while project support argues from a specific gap and a logic model, and the draft restructures accordingly.
Limitations, stated plainly: it cannot know whether this funder is currently accepting inquiries, whether their priorities changed at their last board meeting, or whether your executive director already has a relationship there that should change the approach. Every outcome figure it carries forward comes from your input and is marked for verification — the model does not know your data and must not be trusted to remember it. A weak alignment audit is information, not a drafting problem to write around. Nothing here is legal or tax advice.