A recent article on the Third Sector website - Why funders rarely give feedback - looks at some of the reasons why funding applications fail and why funders may not provide feedback.

Some of the reasons for failure may not be easy reasons for the funder to communicate with an applicant. For example, some of the reasons may include:

• The funder may want to fund a balanced portfolio of projects and yours may be too similar to other projects
• The application may be very strong and so the funder may feel that your application will stand a good chance of obtaining funding elsewhere
• The funder may have an open funding policy and decide which projects to fund on the basis of the policy implications that the applications imply

Sometimes the reason for a failed application can be predicted, but in other cases it may be much harder to understand why an application has been turned down. It may help, when researching a funder, to get a picture of what type of funder they are and to gauge what sort of pressures they are under.