NOFO

The document an agency publishes to announce a funding opportunity and set its rules: who may apply, how much, by when. It is not a field on a record — it is the document every field on a record was read from, and the record links it and dates the reading.

Part of the GrantTrove grant funding glossary — one entry for every field the catalogue stores.

Also called Notice of funding opportunity · NOFA · Funding announcement · Solicitation · RFP

In detail

Agencies do not use one word for it. Grants.gov calls it a notice of funding opportunity, HUD and several state agencies publish a NOFA, foundations issue an RFP, and some programmes simply post guidelines. The document does the same job under all four names, which is why the spelling a reader arrives with is not a different thing to go looking for.

Its practical property is that it changes. A notice gets amended, a deadline extended, an amount corrected, and the version somebody read in March is not the version that governs in June. That is a data problem before it is a reading problem: a record extracted once and never re-read is a claim about a document that may no longer say it.

Against the record you are reading

A NOFO is the grantmaker’s document. A GrantTrove record is our reading of it. Everything on a record is a claim we make about a notice, which is why every record carries a source URL, the day we last checked it and the method we used. Where the two disagree the notice governs, and the record’s own link is how a reader finds that out in one click.

How GrantTrove stores it

  • The notice is held as provenance rather than as a field. `source_url` is required on every record and cannot be null, `source_snapshot_key` points at the copy we captured, and `source_fingerprint` is what tells a sweep the page changed since we read it.
  • `last_verified_at` is the date printed as “Checked” on every row and on every record. It is the day we last read that notice — not the day the page was built.
  • A portal’s own identifier for the notice, where the portal publishes one, is stored separately in `source_post_id` rather than parsed back out of a title.

Common questions

Do you store the NOFO number?

Not as its own column. Where a portal publishes an identifier we keep it in `source_post_id`, and the record links the notice, which carries the agency’s own numbering.

What happens when a notice is amended?

The sweep re-reads it on a fixed cycle, and `source_fingerprint` is what detects that the page changed. What no re-read can do is tell you what changed since you last looked — for that, the record links the notice itself.

Why is RFP listed as another name for this?

Because readers arrive with it. Near-synonyms resolve to one entry rather than to thin pages of their own, which is the same rule the catalogue’s vocabulary follows.