Funder Research: How to Narrow Down or Enlarge the Field

As I have grown my business, I have found I now have to spend more time training our staff on the basics of grant research. It turns out that grant research is both extremely important and surprisingly difficult to do right. Most grant researchers find that they stumble on a ton of possibilities or else none at all. Consequently, they need to know how to adjust their search to find more or less prospects. By and large, I think most grant researchers are unfamiliar with the options available to them when they use a standard grant research database. In particular, they may be unfamiliar with their range of options.

There are four general categories that will be most useful to you: subject matter, location, target population, and type of grant.

Subject matter: The first step, in my view, is to focus on broader terms like education, social welfare, healthcare, or justice. If this gives you too many hits, then you can simply switch to narrower terms like low cost housing, minority education, teen pregnancy, or electronic health records. Of course, it helps if you have a general understanding of the work done by non-profit organizations when you follow this procedure. In my experience, however, this sort of knowledge will just come to you naturally over time and you start researching grants. In a pinch, however, it pays to review sample grant proposals or the project innovator form filled out by the client to get a better idea of the range of wording available for your search.

Location: If I stall out with this option, I next turn to the project's location. For example, I ask if my project is going to have an impact on a specific city, county, state, regional, national, or international location? Most grant funders, of course, focus their resources close to home. Nevertheless, I think that adjusting your geographic focus will increase funding opportunities. In addition, it is generally extremely easy to use geographic search terms.

Target Population: After searching on subject matter and location, I then turn to the target population itself. This is basically the group of people who will most benefit from your grant project. Sample target populations would include single moms, the frail elderly, disadvantaged youth, the homeless, persons with low incomes, at-risk youth, international journalists, HIV/AIDS patients, and so on. In general, I find that there is more funding for children than the elderly and for less stigmatized rather than more stigmatized groups.

Type of Grant: Finally, I focus in on the type of grant that the charity or individual or business wants to win. Most of the database search engines you use will offer to search under a variety of different types of grants such as: capacity building, challenge, conference, construction, consulting, demonstration, dissemination, endowment, equipment, exhibition, general purpose, land acquisition, matching, operation, planning, publication, renovation, research, scholarship, seed, special project, subvention, training, and travel.