What is grant prospecting?
Grant prospecting is the research step before you write — identifying the funders whose giving record shows they would plausibly fund work like yours, and ruling out the ones who wouldn't. It runs in four passes: build a wide universe of possible funders, qualify on hard filters like geography and organization type, read each survivor's actual giving record, and keep watching as new filings land. The output is a short, evidence-backed list of funders worth writing to — not a long list of names.
The four passes
In order. Each one is cheaper than the one after it, which is the reason for the order — you want the expensive reading to happen on the shortest possible list.
-
Pass 1 — Build the universe
Assemble every funder that could conceivably fund your work — not the ones you've heard of. Private foundations, corporate giving programs, community foundations, donor-advised sponsors, government programs. The list should be uncomfortably long at this stage, because the whole point of the next three passes is to cut it down on evidence rather than on memory.
The usual failure is starting from a list of famous names. The foundation most likely to fund a $40,000 program in your county has never been written about.
-
Pass 2 — Qualify on the hard filters
Cut on the things that disqualify you outright, before you read a word of prose: geography, organization type, grant size, and whether the funder accepts unsolicited requests at all. These are cheap to check and they remove most of the list. A perfect mission match in a state the funder has never given in is not a prospect.
A large share of private foundations fund only organizations they already know. Their 990 will tell you — the same names come back year after year, with no new ones.
-
Pass 3 — Read the giving record
For each survivor, read what they actually did rather than what they say. A private foundation's Form 990-PF lists every grant it paid: recipient, amount, and purpose. That gives you the real award size, the real geography, the real subject mix, and whether the roster is open or closed. This is the pass that decides where your writing time goes.
Averages lie here. One outsized grant to a related organization can triple the average and tell you nothing about what you'd be offered.
-
Pass 4 — Watch
Prospecting has no finish line. New 990s land continuously, foundations open and close programs, and a funder that was closed to new grantees three years ago may not be now. A list built once is a snapshot of the filings that happened to be public the week you built it.
This is the pass that gets skipped, because it never feels urgent. It is also the only one that compounds.
A 990-PF, read line by line
Pass 3 is the one worth showing rather than describing. Here is a real private foundation, read the way a prospect researcher would read it. Every figure comes from its public filings for 2020–2024, which is 371 itemised grant lines.
Siemer Family Foundation
Columbus, Ohio · EIN 31-1550556Start with the headline, then distrust it. The most recent filing shows $23,097,268 paid out across 81 grants. Divide one by the other and you get an average of $285,151, which would make this look like a major-gift funder. It isn't. A single line of $18,500,000 went to the Siemer Institute, the foundation's own affiliated initiative — $54,250,000 across the five years. Strip that one recipient out and the picture inverts.
Across all 371 lines for 2020–2024, excluding the related grantee.
- What you'd actually be asking for
- $20,000. Half of all grants fall between $10,000 and $30,000. A request for $100,000 is at the edge of what this foundation does, and anything above the $2,500,000 it has ever given an unrelated organization is out of the question. That single number is worth more than any mission statement.
- Where the money goes
- 91% of grants went to Ohio organizations and 76% to Columbus alone. This is a Columbus funder. If you are not in central Ohio, nothing else on the filing matters — and it took one column of the grant table to find that out, which is the whole point of reading the record before the prose.
- What they fund, in their own words
- Education 178
- Social services 125
- Health 23
- Arts and humanities 11
- Urban affairs 11
Purpose codes as filed. Education and social services account for four out of five grant lines — a narrower funder than "family and community support" would suggest.
- Is the door open?
- This is the question most prospect lists never ask. 32 organizations appear in at least four of the five years, so a large part of the budget is committed before the year starts. But 34 of the 81 grants in the most recent year went to organizations that hadn't appeared in the four years before it — across the period, 159 distinct organizations received something. The roster is sticky, not closed. That is a prospect worth a letter of inquiry.
Every funder profile on Grantable is built this way, from the filings — free to read, no account needed. Figures on this page were read from the 2020–2024 filings on 17 September 2026; foundations file months after their fiscal year ends, so the profile may show a later year.
The free tools, compared
990 filings are public, so most of this research can be done for nothing. These are the tools that matter, what each one is genuinely good at, and where each one stops.
| Tool | What it's for | What you get free | Where it stops | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search | The filings themselves, straight from the source | Every public Form 990, 990-PF and 990-EZ as a PDF or raw XML, plus exemption status | You search by organization, not by who they funded. Grant lines are inside the document, so there is no way to ask "who funds literacy programs in Ohio?" | Free |
| ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer | The filings, made readable and searchable | Parsed financials and filing history for millions of organizations, full-text search across filings, an open API | Built for journalists and researchers rather than grant seekers, so it is organized around the filer, not around finding a funder for your programs | Free |
| Candid (free tier) | Funder profiles and the Foundation Directory | Limited lookups and basic profile information; full grantmaker search, giving history and saved lists are on the paid Foundation Directory tiers | The parts of the directory most useful for prospecting — searching by what a funder actually funded — sit behind the subscription | Free tier; paid tiers for the full directory |
| Grantable | Parsed giving records, plus matching against your organization | Free funder and grant directory, searchable by what a funder funded, plus AI matching against 990 data from 800,000+ organizations — six prospect assessments a month, no credit card | US organizations only, and the data is only as current as the most recent public filing — foundations file months after their fiscal year ends | Free tier; paid plans add the writing workspace |
All four are worth knowing. If you only ever use one, use the one that lets you search by what a funder funded rather than by the funder's name — that is the difference between looking up a foundation you already know and finding one you didn't. How we build our funder data.
Prospecting that keeps running
The first three passes are work you can do yourself, and this page has just shown you how. The fourth one is the problem. Funders file new 990s all year, programs open and close, and a list built in March is describing a world that has already moved. Funders change every month. Your list won't.
That is what a grants department is for. A department doesn't search once. Grantable keeps checking for opportunities that fit the organization it works for, and when it finds one it tells you — in the app, in your workspace inbox, and by email — with the grant lines it reasoned from attached: which similar organizations this funder has given to, how much, and in which years. You check the reasoning rather than take it on faith.
Prospecting is free. 190,000+ funders and 800,000+ organizations, built from public IRS 990 filings.
Frequently asked questions
What is grant prospecting?
+
Grant prospecting is the research step before you write: identifying the funders whose giving record shows they would plausibly fund work like yours, and ruling out the ones who wouldn't. It runs in four passes — build a wide universe of possible funders, qualify on hard filters like geography and organization type, read each survivor's actual giving record (for private foundations, the IRS Form 990-PF), and keep watching as new filings land. The output is a short, evidence-backed list of funders worth writing to, not a long list of names.
How do I read a 990-PF to find grant funders?
+
Open the foundation's Form 990-PF and go to Part XIV (Supplementary Information), where grants paid during the year are itemized: recipient name, city and state, amount, and purpose. Read four things. First, the median grant, not the total or the average — one large grant to a related organization can distort both. Second, the geography: if every recipient is in one metro area, that is the real eligibility rule. Third, the purposes, which show the subject mix in the foundation's own words. Fourth, the recipient names across several years — if the same names repeat with no new ones, the roster is effectively closed. Part XV tells you whether the foundation accepts unsolicited applications and how.
How do I find foundations that fund organizations like mine?
+
Work backwards from grantees rather than forwards from funders. Identify five to ten organizations doing work close to yours, in a similar place and at a similar size, then find the foundations that funded them — visible in those foundations' 990 filings. Co-funding is one of the strongest signals available, because it is evidence of a decision already made rather than a stated preference. Grantable does this against the 990 filings of 800,000+ organizations, including 190,000+ funders, and shows you the grant lines it reasoned from: which similar organizations the funder has given to, how much, and when.
Is there a free way to see which foundations gave grants to nonprofits like mine?
+
Yes. Form 990 filings are public. The IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search hosts the raw filings, ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer makes them searchable by organization, and Grantable's free funder directory has the grant lines parsed into structured profiles you can read without opening a PDF. All three are free. The difference is how much of the reading you do yourself.
Can AI do grant prospect research automatically?
+
AI can do the mechanical parts well: reading filings at volume, extracting grant lines, and comparing a funder's giving record against a description of your organization. It cannot judge a relationship, and it should not be trusted without the evidence attached — any suggestion worth acting on should come with the grant lines that produced it, so you can check them. Treat it as a way to get to a short list you can verify, not as a decision.
How many prospects does a nonprofit actually need?
+
Fewer than most lists suggest. A short pipeline of genuinely aligned funders — where the giving record shows they fund your kind of work, at your size, in your place — is worth more than a long list assembled on keyword matches. The useful habit is adding a small number of qualified prospects steadily rather than assembling a large list once a year, because the underlying filings keep changing.