Grant Research: Effective strategies to find grants

Explore federal, state, and local grant makers and learn to navigate the federal grants database and state/local portals, comparing high-value federal opportunities with local options.

Explore two business grantmakers: corporations and small local businesses. Corporations vary in reach (3M to Xerox), while local businesses offer faster, smaller grants.

Explore two foundation types—community foundations and private foundations—and how geographic focus, benefactor funding, and targeted causes shape grantmaking, and learn where to find them.

discover how to navigate grants.gov to find federal funding opportunities, filter by keywords and eligibility, and leverage the program solicitation to assess fit and deadlines.

Discover five free resources to find grants, including lesser-known databases, to reduce competition and boost your chances of grant funding.

Explore state home pages for grants and funding, and sign up for state and town email lists to uncover grants and RFP opportunities in education, health, development, and housing.

Discover professional organizations as a grant source by checking discipline-specific and general associations for member-only grants, awards, and scholarships. Leverage newsletters and dues to uncover opportunities with lower competition.

Learn how to find funders that are a good fit using grant research databases, filter by criteria, verify with funder websites and 990, and start local to avoid wasteful applications.

Create a ten-item intake sheet to screen grant eligibility. Capture official name and incorporation, location, mission, audience, focus areas, budget, geographic area, website, and top funding needs.

Learn the core grant research process using both paid and free tools, including Foundation Directory Online, with actionable steps and downloadable resources to streamline your grant search.

Use the grant research database with advanced search and filters in Foundation Directory Online, guided by intake form data on subject area, geographic focus, population served, and target audiences.

Learn to navigate grant search results, recognizing that large match sets may include unsuitable prospects from intake form data, and master one-by-one grant research screening to identify truly relevant grants.

Organize your grant prospects by turning a large intake list into a screened, qualified file. Capture funder name, website, deadline, approach, award amount, and focus areas to identify strong fits.

Learn how to screen grant prospects by verifying mission alignment, focus areas, geographic scope, and eligibility, then use the 990s and notes to build a qualified prospect list.

Learn how to screen a large list of grant prospects for fit and eligibility, using landing pages, deadlines, and proximity, guided by a foundation directory online.

Evaluate funder alignment by assessing community needs and funder priorities in a case. Identify future opportunities, such as a financial education program for teens, while noting current funding gaps.

Screen a prospects list of 30–70 grants, narrow to the top six best fits, and craft informed, aligned requests based on funders' interests and deadlines.

Use Form 990s to gather mission, geographic preferences, and focus areas when a foundation lacks a website. Then verify fit for already screened prospects and fine-tune your list with examples.

Explore a free 990s database to identify education grants for a Montana summer camp serving at-risk youth, and use the 990s finder to locate funding amounts.

Transition from donor research to grant applications by examining the three options: letter of intent, application, and proposal, and their commonalities.

Explain the letter of intent, a one-page, high-level introduction of your organization and program to test interest, often used as a screening step before proposals.