Template & guide
The Notice of Intent (NOI):
what to collect and how to decide
The Notice of Intent — sometimes called an Intent to Apply — is the front gate of your competition. Done well, it saves reviewers weeks and spares applicants from writing full applications they can't win. Here's a practical template and decisioning approach used by state service commissions.
What to collect in an NOI
- Organization legal name, EIN, UEI, and SAM.gov registration status
- Primary contact name, title, email, and phone
- Intended competition and focus area (e.g., Formula, VGF)
- Proposed service locations — counties or communities served
- Requested AmeriCorps member slots (MSYs) and estimated federal share
- A brief program description — one or two paragraphs, not a narrative
- New applicant vs. continuation/recompete status
Keep it short on purpose
An NOI should take an applicant under an hour. If your NOI looks like a mini-application, you'll discourage exactly the small, community-based organizations your portfolio needs — and you'll create review work you didn't need.
Decisioning: the part most commissions skip
Collecting NOIs is easy. Deciding them cleanly is where processes break down. Each NOI should get an explicit outcome — invited to apply, invited with conditions, or not invited — with a written reason and a timestamp.
That decision should be a hard gate: applicants who weren't invited shouldn't be able to submit a full application. When the gate lives in email and spreadsheets, ineligible applications slip through and consume reviewer time.
How The Grant Gateway handles NOIs
The Grant Gateway includes a built-in NOI stage: applicants submit through your branded portal, staff review and record decisions in-platform, and only invited organizations can proceed to the full application. Every decision is logged with a timestamp — so when someone asks why an organization was or wasn't invited, the answer is already written down.
See the NOI workflow in action
We'll show you exactly how your commission's Notice of Intent, decisioning, and application gate would run on The Grant Gateway.