Foundations Created the Jargon Crisis. Here’s How They Can Fix It.
Every touchpoint in the grant-making process — from letters of inquiry to progress reports — trains nonprofits to write in jargon. Funders have the power to change that pattern.
By Matt Watkins
Contributor
April 30, 2026 | Read Time: 5 minutes
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At a perilous moment for philanthropy, the sector faces a problem of its own making: a failure to explain what it does clearly — even as it argues for the indispensability of its work. This is the inevitable result of a funder-created system that rewards abstract language and trains grantees to write for highly educated program officers and subject-matter experts rather than the people they serve.
My last two columns encouraged nonprofits to change how they speak, but that can’t happen if foundations don’t change their practices. Every touchpoint in the funding process, from letters of inquiry to progress reports to final evaluations, teaches nonprofits how to talk about their work. The language they use doesn’t stay inside the funding relationship — it becomes the way organizations explain themselves to everyone else.
Shifting this pattern requires foundations to make changes in three areas: what they require in grant applications, what they fund, and what they model in their own communications. None of those changes works without the others.
Reward grant applications that replace jargon with clarity.
At the most basic level, every grant application should require a public communication plan alongside descriptions of the program work. But funders shouldn’t stop there. Nonprofits, after all, could learn to write the requested communications plan without changing their practices.
Instead, foundations should evaluate these plans based on whether they can be understood by people outside the sector, not just by grant reviewers. At minimum, the plan should answer three questions: Who outside the organization needs to understand this work? What should they be able to say about it? How will the organization reach them?
Getting the scoring of applications right matters as much as requiring the plan. Foundations should avoid giving higher marks to proposals that describe work in terms of strategies and systems rather than people and results. When a reviewer marks down an applicant for stating simply that the group’s housing program “helps families find stable homes” — rather than providing “place-based, community-driven affordable housing access” — the foundation is perpetuating the language of think tanks and academia, not the language of public understanding.
Proposals should be scored on whether someone outside the sector can identify who is helped, what changes for them, and why it matters. One way to test that standard is to include an outside reader in the review process, such as a local librarian, small-business owner, or other community member from the area a grantee serves. If that reader can’t answer those questions clearly, the proposal should score lower.
Fund the work of explanation.
Project grants typically fund the internal communications efforts needed to keep grant makers in the loop: progress reports, grant updates, and funder-facing summaries. They do not fund the work of explaining the project, or the organization as a whole, to people who aren’t familiar with it. That broader communications work still gets done by whoever has an hour, in whatever language they absorbed from the last grant application they wrote. But that isn’t nearly enough.
Consider a food pantry running three foundation-funded programs at once. None of the grants covers the staff time to write the neighborhood newsletter, update the website, or prepare remarks for a city council hearing on food access. Yet foundations often have more discretion over general operating support than they use. They need to dip into those funds to pay for staff time or consultants who can translate a nonprofit’s work to the broader world. When grant makers restrict communications funding to specific projects, it should be no surprise when grantees’ messages aren’t resonating with the public.
Apply the same standard to your own communications.
Foundations cannot demand clarity from grantees while hiding behind language they would reject in an application.
This series has offered a straightforward test for any communication with members of the public: Can someone outside the sector recognize what you do, trace how you do it, and explain why it matters?
Consider what passing the test looks like in practice. Take a common foundation annual report sentence:
Before: “We advance systems-level change through equity-centered grant making that builds community capacity across our priority geographies.”
A reader outside the sector cannot identify who is helped, what changed, or where. Now apply the test:
After: “Last year we funded 17 organizations in Cook County working on housing stability. One of them helped 340 families avoid eviction by connecting them to emergency rental assistance they did not know they qualified for.”
The difference isn’t about style but about whether the foundation is writing for the public or for itself.
Clarity earns trust but so does honesty about an organization’s failures. When something didn’t work, say so and explain what you learned. Foundations that acknowledge failure build more lasting credibility than those that only report success. People understand that hard problems do not produce clean results.
A foundation that revises its grant applications but cannot pass its own annual report test is asking grantees to do something it won’t do. A funder that models clarity but restricts communications funding has diagnosed the problem without providing resources for the solution. Grant makers have an obligation to close that distance, not as a communications strategy, but as the basic condition of operating with public money and public trust — neither of which is a guarantee.
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