Working the Prospect Table

A prospecting search gives you a ranked shortlist. What it doesn’t give you is a decision. The prospect table is where you make one — scanning the candidates, reading what Grantable wrote about each, and narrowing a long list into the two or three funders actually worth going after.

It’s a triage surface. Not a spreadsheet you live in, not a database you maintain — a quick working view that gets you from “here are the matches” to “here’s who we’re pursuing” in one pass.

What You See at a Glance

The in-chat prospect table showing five funders with Fit badges (Strong/Good), location, and annual giving

Every row is one funder. At the table level, you see:

Fit badge

Color-coded quick signal — Strong, Good, Moderate, Low. This is a triage hint, not a numeric score. Use it to prioritize the order you click through, not as a final verdict.

Funder name

The organization. Clicking the row opens its Prospect Brief in the context panel so you can read Grantable's full write-up on why it's a match.

Location

Geographic base and scope — tells you at a glance whether geography is likely to be a match without opening the brief.

Annual giving

Scale of the funder's activity. A funder giving $50M+ a year operates differently than one giving $1M. Both can be good fits, but the approach is different.

The label at the top is the search vector — the descriptive name of the folder this shortlist was saved into (“Environmental Stewardship — Portland, OR 2026” in the screenshot). You can return to that folder anytime, rerun the search, or schedule it to refresh.

Reading Before Deciding

The table is the entry point; the Prospect Brief is where the decision actually gets made. Click any row and the brief opens beside the conversation — Fit Classification, Why This Is a Match, Key Data Points from 990 filings, Notable Grantees, Red Flags. One or two minutes of reading per brief is usually enough to know whether a funder is worth deeper attention.

Pro tip

Don’t agonize over a first pass. If a brief doesn’t earn your interest in two minutes, dismiss it. The ones that stop you — because the grantees look like peers, or the giving pattern fits, or a program area surprises you in a good way — are the ones to accept and go deeper on.

Accept, Dismiss, and Why It Matters

Hover over a row and the Fit badge swaps to a pair of action buttons — a green check to Accept and a red × to Dismiss.

Hovering a prospect row reveals Accept and Dismiss icon buttons in the Fit column, with a Dismiss tooltip on the red X

The two moves are intentionally light-touch:

Accept — moves the funder to your active shortlist. Grantable can now build opportunity briefs for it, include it in fit scoring, and reference it when you ask questions across your pipeline. The row’s Fit badge becomes a green Accepted tag.
Dismiss — removes the funder from active consideration. The row stays visible but gets struck through with a gray Dismissed tag — and Grantable opens a small reason prompt in chat: “Tell me why — this helps refine future searches (or just send to skip).”

After accepting one funder and dismissing another, the row badges show Accepted (green) and Dismissed (gray, with the funder name struck through); below the table, a reason-prompt panel asks why PCEF was dismissed

You can answer in a sentence — “wrong grant size,” “geography’s off for us,” “already applied in 2024” — or skip. What you tell Grantable about a dismiss is what it carries into the next search. Funders similar to the one you rejected get deprioritized; your original reasoning shapes the re-ranking.

Dismissing with a specific reason is how you train future searches. If your dismiss history shows you repeatedly turn down funders for geographic reasons, the next /prospecting run weights geography more heavily. A silent dismiss is a wasted signal — the prompt is there for a reason.

Working the Table Conversationally

The table isn’t the only way to work a shortlist. You can keep the conversation going and ask Grantable about specific prospects, or across the whole table:

“Which two of these have the strongest recent giving to organizations our size?”

“Compare Healy Foundation and Gray Family Foundation — which is a better first ask?”

“Dismiss the ones that don’t fund programs with multi-year commitments.”

Grantable can read the briefs it just wrote, pull additional 990 data, and act on the table directly — updating fit signals, dismissing rows, or surfacing details you’d otherwise have to hunt for.

Check your understanding

You have a prospect table with eight funders, ranked by fit badge. What's the most efficient first pass?

Key Takeaways

The prospect table is a triage surface — scan the fit badges, click rows to read the briefs, decide which to pursue
Fit badges prioritize your order of attention; the brief is where decisions actually get made
Accept builds your active shortlist; dismiss with a reason shapes future searches
You can work the table conversationally — ask Grantable to compare funders, dismiss in bulk, or surface specific details without leaving chat

Next Lesson

Once your shortlist is narrowed to the funders you actually want to evaluate, Grantable can produce a Grant Opportunity Brief for a specific RFP. Inside that brief lives the Decision Matrix — where the apply/pass call gets scored, gaps get listed, and effort gets estimated. That’s next.