Do not walk into a funding room knowing only your own organization.

Four things. In your own words.

• Who you are approaching, or that you do not know yet.
• What you are trying to get done.
• Where the work happens.
• What is actually happening — the part that does not fit in an application.

The Capital Intelligence Brief™

Roughly six to ten pages, depending on the question. Scope varies: we write the sections your question actually needs and leave out the ones it does not. We do not pad a brief to look thorough.

• Know the RoomWho decides, how the decision moves, and what this institution has actually funded.
• Numbers You Can UseEvidence about your place and your work, each with source, date, and geography.
• What the Numbers Mean TogetherThe pattern the separate figures make when they are read as one picture.
• What They May MisreadWhere this room is likely to read your organization wrong, and the measurable evidence that corrects it.
• Your PositionWhat you carry that this room cannot get anywhere else.
• The MatchWhere your work and this institution's stated purpose actually meet.
• How to Say ItThe language for this room, in your voice, not generic register.
• What to MeasureThe indicators worth tracking so the next ask is stronger than this one.
• Sources / What Needs VerificationEvery figure attributed. Everything still unverified named as unverified.
• Next MoveThe one thing to do next, and who does it.

We answer that with measurable evidence, not labels.

A room can misread a small budget as inexperience, a volunteer model as instability, or a community-rooted structure as informality. None of those are true by definition. We name the specific misread that is likely in this specific room, then put the evidence next to it — the record, the retention, the reach, the years, the partners, the money already moved.

Here's exactly how carefully we handle what you tell us, so that misread doesn't happen to you.

• Every number carries its source, its date or period, its geography, and what it does and does not establish.
• We separate verified fact, Community Intelligence — what your community already knows and tells you, even before it's written down anywhere — inference or hypothesis, what needs verification, and what is simply unknown.
• We do not infer motive. A funding pattern is described as a pattern, never converted into a claim about who an institution is.
• No match probability. No readiness percentage. No score that turns a history of exclusion into a reason to stop asking.
• Budget size, grassroots identity, community-rooted status, geography, and identity-based mission are not proxies for sophistication, and we do not treat them as such.
• Where race, class, gender, or geography is part of the evidence, we include it. We never assume a problem from identity alone.

A note on research, plainly: this product has no live external research integration, and we will not pretend otherwise. Your brief is built from the information you submit plus public-source research performed and reviewed by DSG. No autonomous system goes out and investigates on your behalf. Every source is named in the brief.

$175 buys one brief on one funding question about one named institution or room. A second room is a second brief. The four sections listed above are guaranteed; any section beyond them appears only where the evidence carries it, and a section we cannot evidence is left out and named as a gap rather than filled.