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.

Using the Foundation Center's On-Line Directory to Help You Find the Best Funders

One of the most exciting moments in my Grant Writing Fundamentals course is when I open up my subscription to the Foundation Center's On-Line Directory and show the participants all the grants the funders have given to charities in their community. This never gets old. Participants who are new to grant writing are astounded by the sheer number of grants, their size, and the detailed information you can harvest about the funders. 

Check Out This Video for Tips on Using the Foundation Center's Online Directory.

One of the most basic fundamentals of success in grant writing is for a grant writer to ignore the time-consuming clutter of questionable on-line resources and instead devote their attention to the best available resource for learning about and finding funders, The Foundation Center in New York. This is the oldest, most reliable non-profit resource for grant writers. 

In addition to directing participants to this extremely significant website, I like to point out that the Foundation Center maintains an on-line directory which is the best possible tool for researching grants. Their Essential Plan gives you access to the most important features of their database, at a price of $49.99/mo. You can save $16.77 amonth if you make your annual payment as a lump sum. (You can also get access to the results of this database by working with Drew & Associates.) 

Thankfully, you can get access to the Foundation Center's On-Line Directory for free by visiting one of their network partners. For a list of the partnership organizations that give you free access to the On-Line Directory, please click on the following link. As their website indicates, they provide free funding information through more than 450 Funding Information Network locations - libraries, community foundations, and other nonprofit resource centers located across the U.S. and several countries. They even provide a resource to help you find a network location near you if you click on this link.

As a professional grant writing consultant, I use a number of tricks and techniques to speed up the process for finding good matches for our client's most important projects. Overall, I organize my search by looking at the largest funders. These are the funders which actually are the easiest to win money from and the best to get to know and build a relationship with over the long-run. 

Next, I always make it a practice to click on the limitations line in the funder's report first. If it turns out that my client is not eligible for a grant from that funder, I need to know that information right away. Otherwise, I will waste time getting lost in the details of the funder's profile. 

Third, I am especially careful to read through the funder's interests to make sure that they are interested in the same topics as my clients and that the funder is also willing to support the type of funding that my clients are looking for whether that funding is for programs, capital campaigns, or general operating expenses.

Fourth, I eliminate from my search the funders who say that they do not accept applications. In my experience, they are telling you the truth. In most cases, the funders that say this are too small to support a professional staff or else have decided to give funding to a handful of charities that are closest to them, charities which may employ the funder's children and grandchildren. It is not worth my time to deal with funders if they are not open to supporting new charities. 

Finally, I do pay attention to how the funder distributes its grants among funding categories. If they tend to give a lot of their grants to arts and culture, then I will pay more attention to them if I am contracted by an arts and culture client. All of this is important since I believe that at least one-half of your success as a grant writer depends on doing high quality grant research. I have, at times, written what I thought was a weak application, but nevertheless won a grant simply because I appealed to the exactly right funder. 

Saving Time, Making Money: Thoughts on Sophisticated, Professional Grade Research Tools

Since 2012, I have been a satisfied customer of an online tool for researching grant funders that has been developed by Foundation Search, a Canadian organization. I'm pleased to say it has really made a difference for our clients in winning foundation grants.

It has certainly organized our efforts and saved us time in finding the hottest prospects for your grant campaigns.

One of the most spectacular features of this grant research tool is that it allows us to search on the directors of the foundation that have already given you grants and then identify the other foundations where these people also serve as board members. This tool can be quite useful in identifying the easiest ways to build on your charity's reputation within the funding community - especially its top leadership. 

I'm pleased it has made such a big difference for our efficiency and effectiveness as a grant writing consulting business.  If you would like to see the power of this database for your own charity, please do not hesitate to give me a call and we will perform a quick search to see what surprising opportunities are available in 2016.  

How Do I Follow the Money? Cool Websites Simplify Your Grant Research Chores

I think that everyone in the grant writing business has probably asked themselves: How do I follow the money for non-profit groups getting federal grants and contracts? As a political scientist, I was trained to follow the money no matter what as a tool for determining who had the most power and clout in Washington, D.C. Now, as a grant writer, I still follow the money. I follow the money in order to understand where it is coming from and what I need to say and do to get it.

One of my most important secrets of success is to research the competitors who are also applying for the same pot of grant money. If you would like to start researching your competitors, then you need to know about the following websites.
Check out Guidestar:

You can find another non-profit organization's IRS Form 990’s on Guidestar by going here and registering to use it.  Of course, you will need to use the non-profit's exact name as it appears on their Form 990. The IRS Form 990 is quite interesting because it includes a list of their largest funders along with details on how much they pay their high-level staff and, sometimes, board members. Although key information like phone numbers and addresses may sometimes be blocked out, you will still get enough basic information that a simple Google search will help you fill in the details on any cool information you discover through this remarkable service.

Check out USASpending.gov:

This website is the publicly accessible, searchable website mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 to give the American public access to information on how their tax dollars are spent. Most folks have no idea that this website even exists. Nevertheless it is a terrific way to investigate how much and what kind of federal funding your competitors are receiving from their grant campaigns. Again, you need to look up the exact name that they used when they applied for funding. This is a little tricky, but you can do it with a little persistence and imagination.

Check out annual reports to Congress:

These annual reports are a virtual cornucopia of information on grants. This data is also useful in identifying broad trends in government funding too.

Check out NonProfitFacts.com:

This website is particularly good for laying out the basic financial facts about a competitor organization without the tedious detail of reviewing the IRS 990 Form. The downside, however, is that it will not give you the names of the specific funders who give to the organization. Nevertheless, this is a good resource for getting the big picture overview of the folks you are competing with in the non-profit marketplace.