The RFP scorecard we use to triage 40 opportunities a week down to the 3 worth pursuing

What follows is the scorecard we've refined over hundreds of pursuits across four years. It takes about twenty-five minutes a week to run on a typical pipeline of thirty to forty opportunities. It produces a final shortlist of three to five things actually worth investing in. More importantly, it gives the team a shared language for why something stays on the list and why something gets killed, which is the part that breaks down without a framework.

Why most scorecards fail

I've seen a lot of grant scorecards. Most of them are too long, too qualitative, or both. They list fifteen factors weighted by gut. They produce a number, but everyone on the team interprets the number differently, so the final go/no-go decision still happens by argument instead of by score. That defeats the entire point.

A working scorecard has three properties. First, it's small enough that one person can run it in three minutes per opportunity. Second, the dimensions are independent — scoring one dimension does not change how you score another. Third, there are kill criteria that override the score entirely. Without kill criteria, you will eventually convince yourselves to pursue something you have no business pursuing because the rest of the numbers looked okay.

The four dimensions

We score on four dimensions. They're weighted to add to 100, but you can adjust the weights for your context. The defaults below have held up well for organizations with mixed federal and foundation pipelines.

Mandate fit (35)

This is the dimension every team overestimates. Mandate fit is not "could we make this work?" It is "is this what we already do, with proof?" A 9 or 10 means you have shipped this exact kind of work in the last three years and have evaluation data. A 7 means it's adjacent and you'd need to argue around the edges. A 5 means it's a real stretch. A 3 means you're writing a proposal because you can't admit it isn't for you.

The discipline here: if mandate fit is below 6, the opportunity dies regardless of what the other scores look like. This is the kill criterion that prevents the worst kind of pursuit — the one you talk yourselves into because the funding is generous.

Win likelihood (30)

We score this on three sub-signals. First, structure of the competition: directed, restricted, or open. A directed competition has named candidates the agency expects to fund — if you're not named, you're likely a courtesy applicant. Second, prior award patterns: who has won the last three rounds of this program? Are they all in your peer group or all not? Third, your position on the relationship ladder with the program officer: have you talked to them in the last six months?

A 9 is a competition where the structure favors you, the past winners look like you, and you have a real relationship. A 5 is an open national competition where you're competitive but not advantaged. A 2 is one you should not enter unless the spillover score is unusually high.

Value vs effort (20)

The honest math: award size times probability of winning, divided by total cost of pursuit. Cost of pursuit is not just hours. It includes partnership coordination, evaluation design, letters of support, post-award reporting burden, and indirect-cost rate disagreements. Some grants are structurally expensive to manage even if you win — federal contracts in particular.

A 9 here means a six-figure-plus award with a clean reporting structure and a workload your team can absorb. A 5 means the math roughly breaks even on expected value. A 3 means you'll spend more on pursuit than you can rationally expect back, and you're justifying it on spillover alone.

Strategic spillover (15)

This is the dimension that lets you say yes to something with low win likelihood. What you actually want here is a clear answer to: "if we spend forty hours on this and lose, what did we get?" Good answers: a real relationship with a program officer in a strategic agency, a new partnership, data we needed anyway, a narrative we'll reuse on three other proposals. Bad answer: "we'll learn the process." You don't need a forty-hour learning exercise.

The kill criteria

Three things kill an opportunity regardless of the score.

• Mandate fit below 6.
• Deadline less than 21 days from your decision date for federal, 14 days for foundation.
• A required partner you don't have and can't credibly bring on in time.

These look obvious in a list. They are not obvious in a meeting at 4pm on a Tuesday when someone is excited about an opportunity. The kill criteria exist precisely to be applied without re-litigation.

A worked example

Here's how three real-ish opportunities score. Numbers are 1-10.

Two things to notice. The broadband RFP has the highest win likelihood of the three, but the mandate fit kills it. This is the discipline. The youth mental health grant has a low win score but enormous spillover — we'd build a relationship with the foundation that maps to three other programs we want to enter next year. We pursue it, but on a scoped budget: we don't spend more than twenty hours on the narrative.

Running the pass — 25 minutes a week

The point of the scorecard is speed and consistency. Here's how we actually run it.

Minutes 0-5: open the new-opportunities tab. Apply kill criteria. Anything under-fit, over-deadline, or missing required partners gets deleted now.

Minutes 5-20: score the survivors on the four dimensions. Three minutes per opportunity is enough if you've done it before. The first month it'll take five.

Minutes 20-25: sort by score, present the top five to the team. The team can override on spillover or kill, but cannot re-score during the meeting. Re-scoring during the meeting is how the scorecard quietly dies — once you let it happen, every future pass becomes a debate about whether the numbers are right.

What to do when you disagree with the score

You will. The scorecard will sometimes tell you to pursue something you don't want to pursue, or to kill something you're emotionally attached to. The discipline isn't blind obedience to the numbers. It's asking, in the moment, "what did the score miss?"

If the answer is "it didn't miss anything, I just want this one," the score wins. If the answer is "there's a strategic relationship at stake here that the spillover dimension didn't capture," update the spillover score and rerun. Over time, those moments are how the scorecard gets sharper. They are not how you should overrule it ad hoc.

The honest summary

A scorecard you actually run beats a perfect scorecard you don't. Start with these four dimensions, the weights as written, and the three kill criteria. Run it weekly for six weeks without changing the weights. Then adjust based on what you've learned about your own pipeline. By month three you'll be triaging in fifteen minutes and the team will fight you far less about what to drop, because everyone is reading from the same scorecard.