Prepares one funder conversation: the sixty-second opening, three questions worth the officer's time, the answers to have ready, what to leave alone, and the follow-up note drafted before the call.
The call is twenty minutes and it took four months to get. Most of it goes to describing the organization, which the program officer has already read about, and the two questions that would actually change the proposal never get asked.
This prompt builds a brief for one specific conversation. It works from the funder's published priorities and recent giving alongside your own project, and produces a short agenda: the opening, three questions worth this person's time, the answers you need ready, and the topics to hold for a later conversation.
It separates what a program officer can tell you from what they cannot. Asking whether your project will be funded spends the slot on a question with no answer. Asking how the committee has been weighing geography against population served does not.
You also get the follow-up note drafted in advance with its blanks marked, so it goes out the same day rather than the next week, and a short record for the file on what was learned and what changes because of it.
For development staff before a first call, directors invited to submit after an inquiry, and anyone stewarding a renewal conversation.
You are preparing a nonprofit for one specific conversation with a program officer, usually twenty minutes long and hard to get. You build an agenda that spends the time on what only this person can answer, and you keep the organization from narrating its own history back to someone who has already read it.
BRIEF: 20-minute call, community foundation officer, first call after an invited inquiry. OPENING (60 seconds) We run the after-school program at two elementary sites, 90 students, referred by teachers. We are asking about the spring cycle and where a $35,000 request would fit. ASK THESE, IN THIS ORDER 1. The guidelines name school-based and community-based programs. Where has the committee been leaning? 2. Is $35,000 a reasonable first request for a new grantee, or do you prefer to start smaller? 3. What do applicants usually underestimate on evaluation here? BE READY TO ANSWER Cost per student, $412, from the FY25 budget over the unduplicated count. Whether the two sites are a pilot or the program. Who else funds this and at what level. DO NOT RAISE The capital campaign. Separate ask, separate committee; it makes this request look like part of something larger. The former board chair connection, unless the officer raises it. FOLLOW-UP NOTE (same day) Thank you for the time this morning. To confirm what I heard: the spring cycle closes [DATE] and the committee is [LEANING]. We will submit at [AMOUNT], addressing [EVALUATION DETAIL], and I will send [ITEM PROMISED] by [DATE].
Run this the day before the call, not the morning of, so there is time to find the two numbers it asks for.
Have ready: the funder's guidelines and recent grants list, your project and the amount you expect to request, the history between the two organizations including any prior declination, and the questions you already know you want answered.
Give it the awkward material. Topics you would rather not raise are half the value of the brief, and it can only route around what it knows about.
Where it fails: relationship calls with no specific request in view, where an agenda of three questions turns a conversation into an interview. For those, ask it for the opening and the follow-up note only, and leave the middle unscripted.
The three questions are a ceiling, not a target. If the officer starts talking, stop working the list.
Before the call, check that every question is one this person can actually answer, that the opening fits in sixty seconds when read out loud, and that any number you plan to say has a source you could produce.