Quality and quantity: the two factors behind a winning application

The conversation repeats itself. An organisation loses an important application and the team’s internal reading is: “the proposal was very good, we don’t understand how it was not selected”. Sometimes they are right and the proposal was good. Sometimes it was not as good as it looked. In both cases the reading is incomplete, because it ignores half of the equation.

Applying to a fund, especially a European fund where you have no access to the evaluation room, do not know who read your proposal or in what mood, comes down to two factors. Quality and quantity. Both matter. They are different.

The quality factor

Proposal quality is not a single variable. There are four components that separate a proposal that is awarded from one that is not.

Internal coherence. The impact-outcome-output-activity chain holds. Activities actually deliver the declared outputs. Outputs produce the expected behavioural changes in stakeholders. Outcomes contribute to impact. There are no weak links, no logical jumps. The evaluator can read the proposal in any direction and the logic stands.

Careful writing. This is not about literary style. It is about clarity. Short sentences. Programme-specific technical terms used with precision, not as decoration. Zero redundancy. When an evaluator reads twenty proposals in a row, the badly written ones lose points before their content is evaluated, because the evaluator stops paying attention.

Surprising in a positive way. In any competitive call, proposals tend to look like each other. Same verbs, same reference frameworks, same structures. The ones that surprise stay in memory. Surprising does not mean being weird or experimental. It means having a concrete and specific angle the others do not have: a piece of territorial data only your organisation knows, an unexpected connection between topics, a methodology drawn from another field.

Alignment with the explicit and the implicit strategy. This is the most underestimated dimension. The explicit strategy is what the call says: thematic priorities, horizontal criteria, keywords. Any competent team reads it. The implicit strategy is what the programme wants to demonstrate this cycle and is not written down: which underrepresented countries it is trying to include, which topics are politically prioritised this year, what kind of consortia the institution wants to make visible. Reading between the lines is what separates an experienced team from a first-time applicant.

The quantity factor

This is where organisations that focus obsessively on quality end up frustrated. Because even an excellent proposal enters a probabilistic logic you do not control.

Surface reading exists. Sometimes an evaluator has fifty proposals and three hours. The first thirty seconds of the title and executive summary decide whether the proposal gets read carefully or skimmed. A technically excellent proposal can fall if the title communicates nothing in five words.

There are arbitrary early filters. Sometimes a proposal is dropped over a minor formal criterion, over a poor fit with the specific scope of a sub-call, or because the assigned evaluator was not inspired that day. These factors are not under your control. But they exist.

Fit with the programme portfolio. Programmes do not select the best proposals in the abstract. They select the best portfolio. If they already chose another proposal from the same country, same topic, or same consortium profile, yours falls out for institutional balance, not for quality. This does not appear in the public criteria, but it happens.

The operational consequence: variance in any call is high. An excellent project can fall out. A correct project can get in. If you depend on a single application to sustain a line of work, you are placing a bet, not running a strategy.

Apply as a portfolio, not as a bet

The organisations that sustain lines of work over time, in LAC and in Europe, are not the ones that get lucky on a specific application. They are the ones that treat fundraising as a portfolio.

The method is concrete. First, you define the strategic hypothesis: which line of work or impact you want to consolidate in the next two to three years. Not the project. The line. Then you map four to six different instruments that could fund that line, each with its own logic: Erasmus+ KA2, a specific Horizon Europe cluster, LIFE, a national cooperation programme, a private foundation with thematic affinity, Global Gateway. And you build a twelve to eighteen-month application calendar, with its deadlines, consortia and narratives adapted to each call.

Each application is an experiment within the same hypothesis. Some win, some do not. But the line moves forward, because it does not depend on a single outcome. And the learning from a proposal that did not win becomes input for the next one.

What this means in practice

Working on quality without working on quantity is naive. Working on quantity without working on quality is exhausting and expensive. The combination of the two is what separates a professional fundraising team from a team that applies reactively every time a call opens.

At 2811, when an organisation asks us for help with a specific application, the first thing we do is ask about the other five they should also be applying for in the same line of work. The question sometimes makes people uncomfortable. But that is where the useful conversation starts.