While grants with confirmed deadlines are ideal for planning, limiting one's prospects to only these grants can lead to "bottlenecks" and last-minute grant writing when funders announce formal deadlines. This stress and the risk of missing deadlines can be avoided by tracking grants with predicted deadlines well-before the funder officially publishes the upcoming application cycle's due date. Instrumentl includes opportunities with both confirmed and predicted deadlines in the database, and even in your matches.

Instrumentl uses past grant cycle data to predict opportunity deadlines that have not yet been officially announced by the funder in order to get you ahead of the game. Predicted deadlines are particularly helpful when planning for recurring or seasonal grants.

Until our Content team can confirm with a funder that their upcoming deadline is finalized, the deadline will be marked as 'Predicted' on the grant page.

At a glance, you can identify opportunities with predicted deadlines by looking at the deadline date—the text of a predicted deadline date is purple and underlined with a dotted line.

To confirm a deadline is predicted, you can hover your cursor over the date

A subset of funding opportunities in the Instrumentl database comprises grants from the U.S. federal government. These opportunities are labeled with 'FORECAST' by the grant name.

Learn more about federal grant forecasts here.

You can find predicted deadline information for opportunities you've saved to your projects by opening up a saved grant page from the Tracker and navigating to the 'Funding Opportunity' tab. Look under 'Application Cycles' to see if the future deadlines are 'Predicted'.

Once you change the status from Researching to Planned or later, you can view and edit the application cycle chosen under 'Your Cycle' on the right-hand side.

Once an upcoming predicted deadline is confirmed, it will no longer be marked as 'Predicted' on the grant page. Instrumentl monitors flagged grants and past deadlines, checking for any updates and verifying new RFP announcements. Predicted deadlines are based on historical patterns, and updates are applied once new information is confirmed.

If the confirmed deadline differs from the predicted deadline for an opportunity saved to your Tracker, you will receive an email alert.

The Instrumentl Content team continually reviews user feedback to ensure grant deadlines are accurate and up-to-date. If you know of a confirmed upcoming deadline for a grant that is still marked as 'Predicted' on Instrumentl, please let us know using the 'Suggest an update' icon in the opportunity page. When reporting inaccurate grant data, include details about the updated deadline and its verified source.

Read our guide on flagging grant/funder data for more details.

Not interested in seeing grants with predicted deadlines? No worries! In your Matches tab, you can filter by 'Deadlines' to view only Opportunity Matches with confirmed deadlines for the upcoming application cycle.

Reach out to our friendly Support team if you have any questions about predicted deadlines. Message us via the chat bubble when you're logged in, or email us at hello@instrumentl.com.