Program pool

In detail

A pool is the headline number on almost every funding announcement, because it is the number the agency wants quoted in a press release. It answers a budgeting question — how much money is moving — and it answers nothing at all about what an applicant should expect to receive.

Portals rarely label it consistently. California publishes it as "Total Estimated Available Funding"; federal notices call it "Estimated Total Program Funding"; a foundation announcement may just say the initiative is worth a number. All three land in one field for us, and all three are kept away from the per-award figure.

Some programs publish an estimated number of awards alongside the pool. Where they do, the pool divided by that count is a far better planning figure than either number alone — and where they do not, the honest answer is that the pool tells you nothing about your award and we do not manufacture one.

Against the award ceiling

A pool is what the program holds; a ceiling is the most one applicant can be given. Reading a $34,000,000 pool as an award size, when the ceiling is $1,250,000, overstates the opportunity by a factor of 27. These are separate columns in our database, separate labels on every page, and separate keys in our structured data — they are never added, averaged, or shown under one heading.

How GrantTrove stores it

• The pool is stored in its own column and rendered under its own label with the words "not an amount any applicant receives" attached wherever it is summed across records.
• Where a program states no pool, the field reads Not stated rather than falling back to the ceiling or to zero. A zero here would say the program has no money.

Common questions