Funders don’t fund projects. They fund alignment

Years ago, I sat in a foundation director’s boardroom in Lagos and asked her one question. Almost every fundraiser before me had asked her “will you fund me?” I asked something else: “How can I help you achieve your goals?”

She paused, and it was a real pause, the kind that tells you someone is actually thinking rather than waiting for you to finish.

On paper, we had nothing in common. She ran a foundation focused on environmental conservation and the green economy. I worked in government, focused on creating jobs for young people. But as she talked, her real constraint became clear: she needed access to spaces to scale her work. My office controlled infrastructure across the state. We already had exactly what she needed.

I didn’t pitch her. I asked more questions, took notes, and came back with a solution instead of a proposal: here’s what we discussed, here’s your constraint, here’s how we solve it. And here’s how solving it also advances what my office was trying to do.

Neither of us compromised our vision. That conversation became a nationwide initiative that has since created thousands of jobs and changed lives across communities that had been waiting for exactly that kind of intervention.

It also taught me the one sentence every fundraiser, NGO leader, and social entrepreneur needs tattooed on their strategy: funders don’t fund projects. They fund alignment.

That single shift in posture, from persuasion to partnership, is the entire argument of my book, The Funding Code: Why Good Work Goes Unfunded and How to Change That. It’s worth spelling out here, plainly, because most organisations are still getting it wrong.

Across the sector, the instinct when funding doesn’t come through is to blame the proposal. Sharpen the language. Redo the budget template. Hire a grant writer. Try again. But the evidence tells a different story. Foundations typically fund somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of the applications they receive, and across surveyed grant-makers, the reason cited most consistently for rejection isn’t poor writing or a weak budget. It’s a fundamental mismatch between what the applicant is offering and what the funder is actually trying to achieve.

Funders decide, often within the first few minutes, whether they are going to fund something. Not after a committee has deliberated for weeks, and not after every page has been read. In those opening minutes, they are answering one question: can this organisation help me achieve what I am already trying to achieve? If the answer is no, everything that follows is noise, however well it’s written. This should be disorienting, because it means the problem most organisations think they have is a communications problem, when really it’s a positioning problem. You cannot write your way out of a mismatch.

Here is what I wish more organisations understood about the people on the other side of the table. A foundation director, a corporate CSR officer, a government programme manager: each of them arrives at their desk already knowing what success looks like. They have a mandate, a strategy, and often a board or a headquarters holding them accountable to goals that existed long before your proposal landed in their inbox.

They are not waiting to be inspired by your mission. They are under real pressure to deliver results aligned with their own vision. When your proposal arrives, they are asking a narrower question than you think: does this help me do what I’ve already committed to doing? When the answer is no, they stop listening, and it’s rarely arrogance. It’s that they can sense, quite quickly, whether you’ve actually understood their world or simply adapted your language to sound like you have. Experienced programme officers see through mimicry immediately. What they are looking for is substantive overlap, a genuine intersection between what your organisation is trying to achieve and what they are already funding, one you can articulate with specificity rather than generality.

This shift in thinking matters everywhere, but it matters with particular urgency for organisations working across Nigeria right now. In January 2025, Executive Order 14169 effectively ended 65 years of USAID assistance to the country, a relationship that had grown from a $90 million obligation in 2002 to $930.2 million in 2024 alone. Across the continent, total US aid fell by roughly a fifth almost overnight. The consequences showed up quickly in national budgets too: Nigeria’s federal allocation for family planning was cut by 97 percent in the 2025 budget, from ₦2.2 billion to ₦66.39 million, as donor support that had underwritten much of that spending dried up.

None of this means institutional capital has disappeared. Domestic philanthropy is real and growing: a cohort of Nigerian philanthropists tracked by the African Philanthropy Forum gave a combined $434 million in foundation and institutional giving over five years, and local intermediaries have moved quickly to fill gaps left by the USAID exit, including one initiative that redirected ₦150 million from a coalition of funders to seventeen local NGOs left stranded by the funding freeze. Corporate CSR budgets, government social investment programmes, and a growing base of impact investors are also reshaping where institutional funding comes from, even as the largest, most familiar international cheques recede. The shape of the funding landscape has changed. There are fewer large, familiar international cheques and a more fragmented mix of domestic foundations, corporate CSR budgets, and impact investors, each with a narrower and more specific idea of what they are trying to achieve. In a landscape like that, alignment becomes the difference between organisations that adapt and those that quietly stall.

The organisations that come through this period intact will not necessarily be the ones with the biggest teams or the most polished proposal templates. They will be the ones that have done the quieter work: understanding a funder’s theory of change before approaching them, reading their annual reports and evaluations, knowing who their current grantees are and what those grantees have in common, and being honest, sometimes brutally honest, about whether a genuine fit exists before spending months pursuing it. A rejected proposal is never simply a missed opportunity. It costs relational capital. A “no” after months of positioning is demoralising for a team and can quietly damage credibility with that funder for cycles to come.

Organisations that chase funding try to get chosen. Organisations that attract funding position themselves as the obvious choice, and they do it through the consistent, unglamorous work of building credibility, documenting impact honestly, and understanding funders’ worlds as thoroughly as they understand their own, long before an application is due.