How to Find Grants: A Prospect Research Guide for Nonprofits

Most grant applications fail before a single word is written — because the organization applied to the wrong funder. Finding the right grants, the ones whose priorities, geography, and giving history actually match your work, is the highest-leverage thing you can do in fundraising. This guide walks through every major funding source, where to search each one, how to qualify a funder so you don't waste weeks on a long shot, and how to turn scattered leads into a working pipeline.

The funding landscape: who gives grants

"Grants" is a catch-all for money from very different kinds of funders, each with its own rules, search tools, and odds. Before you go looking, it helps to know what you're looking at. There are six sources that matter for most nonprofits, researchers, and community organizations.

Federal government

The largest pool by dollar volume, awarded by agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation, and dozens of others. Federal grants are competitive, often six or seven figures, and come with substantial compliance and reporting obligations. They also require your organization to be registered in the federal system before you can apply — more on that below. Federal money is real and worth pursuing, but it rewards capacity: a finance team, audit history, and the staff time to manage a complex award.

State and local government

States, counties, and cities re-grant a great deal of money — some of it federal pass-through, some raised locally. These programs are often less competitive than national federal grants and more closely tied to local priorities, which can favor a community organization that knows its territory. The catch is fragmentation: there is no single national portal, so you search state by state and city by city.

Private and family foundations

Independent foundations (including family foundations) are endowed pools of private money that exist to give it away, governed by IRS rules that require them to pay out roughly 5% of their assets each year. They range from billion-dollar national funders with full staff to tiny family foundations run from a kitchen table that never publish a website. The crucial fact for prospect research: every one of them files a public tax return (the 990-PF) that lists exactly who they funded. That makes even the most invisible family foundation discoverable.

Community foundations

A community foundation is a public charity that pools donations to serve a defined geographic area — a city, county, or region. They hold many individual funds (donor-advised funds, field-of-interest funds, scholarships) and re-grant the proceeds locally. For a place-based nonprofit, the local community foundation is often the single best starting point: it is explicitly looking to fund organizations in your area, it knows the local landscape, and its program officers are reachable. There are several hundred across the United States.

Corporate giving and CSR

Companies give in several ways: through a separate corporate foundation (which files a 990-PF like any foundation), through a direct corporate giving program (often tied to communities where they operate), through employee matching-gift and volunteer-grant programs, and through sponsorships. Corporate giving tends to favor visibility, brand alignment, and local presence — a regional employer funding youth programs in the towns where its workers live. Awards are often smaller than foundation grants but can be faster and more relationship-driven, and matching programs are an underused source of essentially free money.

Donor-advised funds

A donor-advised fund (DAF) is a charitable account a donor opens at a sponsor — a community foundation or a commercial sponsor like Fidelity Charitable — taking the tax deduction up front and then recommending grants to nonprofits over time. DAFs now account for a large and growing share of charitable giving, and many nonprofits report they expect DAFs to matter more, not less, to their budgets going forward. You generally cannot "apply" to a DAF directly, because the donor directs the money. What you can do is make your organization easy to find and easy to give to — list a clear donation page, register on platforms donors and advisors use, and steward existing donors who may have a DAF.

A side-by-side comparison of funding sources

The sources differ on almost every dimension that matters: how hard they are to win, how big the awards are, how fast they move, and where you go to find them. Use this table to decide where to spend your research time given your organization's size and stage.

Where to search, source by source

Knowing the source types is half the job. The other half is knowing the specific tools, and how each one actually works, so you can search efficiently instead of clicking around. Here is where to look for each.

Federal: Grants.gov and SAM.gov

Federal grant discovery runs on two government systems that work together. Grants.gov is the single point of entry where federal agencies post discretionary funding opportunities (called Notices of Funding Opportunity, or NOFOs). Its "Search Grants" feature lets you filter active opportunities by agency, category, eligibility, and keyword, and it is where you ultimately submit. SAM.gov (the System for Award Management) does two things: it hosts the Assistance Listings — a searchable catalog of more than 2,200 federal assistance programs, the modern successor to the old Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance — and it is where your organization must register as an entity before you can apply through Grants.gov.

That registration step is the part newcomers underestimate. SAM.gov registration is free but can take a week or more to process for a new entity, and it must be renewed annually or it lapses. Start it well before any deadline. Individual agencies (NSF's research.gov, NIH's eRA Commons, and others) sometimes run their own submission systems on top of this, so always read the NOFO to see exactly where and how to apply.

State and local: state portals and nonprofit associations

There is no national equivalent of Grants.gov for state money, but a growing number of states run consolidated portals — the California Grants Portal, for example, lists competitive grants and loans from across California state agencies in one searchable place. Search your state's name plus "grants portal" or "grant opportunities." Beyond the state level, check county and city government sites (especially economic development, health, and arts departments) and your state nonprofit association, which often curates funding listings for member organizations. State arts councils, humanities councils, and departments of education are reliable recurring funders worth tracking directly.

Foundations: Candid, Instrumentl, and the rest

For private and community foundations, the workhorse research databases are subscription products, with free tiers and free-access options. Candid's Foundation Directory (the merged organization formerly known as Foundation Center and GuideStar) is the legacy standard: deep grantmaker profiles, recipient histories, and filters by focus area, geography, and award size, built largely on 990 data. It offers paid tiers, a free "Quick Start" tool for basic lookups, and — importantly — free full access at Funding Information Network partner libraries and nonprofit centers around the country. Instrumentl takes a different approach: it layers grant tracking, deadline management, and intelligent matching on top of a continuously updated database of active opportunities across foundation, federal, and state sources, and offers a free trial. Other tools in this space include GrantStation and GrantWatch. The honest summary: Candid is unmatched for deep, accurate funder research; tools like Instrumentl save time with proactive matches and pipeline features. Many organizations use a free or trial tier plus 990s and never pay for more.

The free goldmine: IRS Form 990 filings

Every tax-exempt organization files an annual information return with the IRS, and it is public. For prospect research, the one you want is the 990-PF, filed by private foundations. Buried in it — specifically in Part XV — is a complete list of the grants that foundation paid that year: the recipient organization's name, its location, the grant's purpose, and the dollar amount. There is no richer free source of "who does this funder actually give to." You can read these returns at ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, a free database of millions of filings going back roughly two decades, or through Candid and Cause IQ. A foundation that has never published a website still files a 990-PF, which is how you find the invisible family foundations that quietly fund work like yours.

Donor-advised funds and corporate programs

You cannot search a list of DAF dollars to apply for, because the donor — not the sponsor — directs each grant. The practical play is to be findable and giveable: maintain a clean public donation page, make sure your organization's details are accurate on the platforms advisors use to research charities, and cultivate the donors you already have, some of whom give through a DAF. For corporate giving, start at the company's own "community" or "giving" page, check whether they have a corporate foundation (which you can research via its 990-PF), and use a matching-gift lookup so your existing donors can double their gifts through their employers.

How to qualify a funder before you apply

Finding a funder is not the same as qualifying one. Qualification is where you separate the prospects worth a full application from the ones that will quietly reject you no matter how good your proposal is. Treat prospect research like a funnel: cast wide, then narrow hard. Start with a long list of plausible funders, screen them down to a few dozen strong fits, and finally investigate the finalists in depth until you have a handful of genuinely great matches.

Run every prospect through six questions, in roughly this order, stopping as soon as one disqualifies them.

1. Priorities. Does the funder's stated focus area actually match your work? "We fund education" is not enough — look for the specific sub-focus (early literacy, college access, STEM for girls) and confirm yours fits.
2. Geography. Do they fund your city, county, or state? Many foundations restrict giving to a defined region, and applying outside it is an automatic decline regardless of merit.
3. Grant size. Is the typical award meaningful and realistic for you? A funder whose grants average $5,000 won't write you a $200,000 check, and one whose smallest grant is $250,000 may not bother with your $20,000 request.
4. Eligibility. Do you meet the formal requirements — 501(c)(3) status (or a fiscal sponsor), organization age, budget size, accreditation? Read the fine print before you invest a minute in writing.
5. Application process and deadline. How do they accept requests — an open application, an invitation-only process, or a letter of inquiry first? When is the deadline, and is it a hard date or a rolling review? Some excellent funders accept unsolicited proposals from no one; knowing that early saves wasted effort.
6. Prior grantees. Have they actually funded organizations like yours? This is what the 990-PF answers. If their grant list is full of large hospitals and universities and you're a grassroots group, the fit is weaker than the mission statement suggests.

A funder-qualification checklist

Use this as a scorecard. Rate each criterion as a clear yes, a maybe, or a no, and only advance prospects that are mostly yes. Scoring forces the discipline that keeps a pipeline honest.

How to research a foundation's past giving

The 990-PF is so central to good prospecting that it deserves its own walkthrough. Here is how to read one without slogging through all 30-odd pages.

1. Pull the filing. Search the foundation's name in ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer (or Candid) and open the most recent 990-PF. Grab two or three years if you can — patterns matter more than a single snapshot.
2. Gauge capacity. Look at total grants paid and the fair market value of assets. A foundation paying out $400,000 a year on $9 million in assets tells you the realistic ceiling for any one grant.
3. Read the grant list (Part XV). This is the heart of it: every grantee, location, purpose, and amount. Scan for organizations like yours, awards in your range, and recipients in your geography.
4. Note the application terms. Part XV also states whether the foundation accepts unsolicited requests and what it wants — or flatly says it does not accept applications, which is your cue to move on.
5. Look for the repeat pattern. Funders who gave to a peer organization three years running are signaling durable priorities; a one-time gift may have been a board member's pet project, not an open door.

A worked example

Say you run a literacy nonprofit in Dayton, Ohio, with a $300,000 budget, and you're researching a local family foundation you found in a community-foundation grantee list. You open its last two 990-PFs on Nonprofit Explorer. Assets sit around $12 million; it pays out roughly $550,000 a year. Part XV shows about 30 grants ranging from $5,000 to $40,000, heavily weighted toward education and youth programs in the Dayton metro — and one of them, two years in a row, is a reading program much like yours. That is a strong prospect: the focus fits, the geography fits, your likely ask of $25,000 sits comfortably in their range, and they've already funded a near-peer. Now contrast a national foundation whose 990-PF shows a dozen $500,000 grants to research universities. Same broad cause, completely wrong fit — applying there would be weeks wasted. This is exactly the judgment a directory's mission summary can't give you, but ten minutes with two tax returns can.

Building a grant pipeline and calendar

Prospecting isn't a one-time hunt; it's a system you run continuously. The output of your qualification funnel should be a living grant pipeline — a curated list of vetted, high-fit opportunities — mapped onto a rolling 12-month calendar. For a small nonprofit, a healthy pipeline holds roughly 15 to 25 qualified prospects at a time. That's enough to keep applications flowing without spreading your team so thin that every proposal is rushed.

Track at least these fields for every prospect, in a spreadsheet or a tool like Instrumentl:

• Funder name, type, and the program officer or contact, if known.
• Fit score from your qualification checklist (so you can sort by strength).
• Typical and target award amount.
• Application type — open, invite-only, or LOI-first — and the link or portal.
• Hard deadline, plus the dates your internal drafts, budget, and sign-offs are due.
• Status: researching, cultivating, LOI sent, full proposal in progress, submitted, awarded, declined.
• Required attachments (financials, 990, board list, letters of support) so nothing surprises you the week of the deadline.

The calendar's real value is the lead time it builds in. A good tracker counts backward from each deadline to schedule internal review, budget preparation, and partner or board sign-offs — so a grant due March 1 has a draft due February 1, not a panic on February 28. Map deadlines across the whole year and you'll see your crunch periods coming and can smooth the workload.

Matching your mission to funder priorities

The single best predictor of a grant award is alignment — how clearly the funder can see their own priorities reflected in your work. Strong prospect research isn't just about finding funders who could fund you; it's about finding the ones whose mission and yours genuinely overlap, then making that overlap impossible to miss.

Two filters matter most when you weigh fit. Mission alignment is how closely the funder's stated focus matches what you do. Funding pattern is whether they've actually backed similar organizations or projects before — the 990 evidence that the stated mission translates into real checks. A funder can have perfect mission language and a grant history that never once funded work like yours; trust the pattern over the prose.

Once you've confirmed the fit is real, the writing has to make it obvious. Read the funder's stated priorities and mirror their language — if they fund "economic mobility," frame your work in those terms rather than your internal jargon. The fit should be apparent by the second sentence of your statement of need, your goals and objectives should map to the outcomes they care about, and your budget should reflect what they're actually willing to fund. Alignment found in research and alignment expressed in writing are two halves of the same job.

Warning signs and red flags

Not every "opportunity" is one. Part of finding grants is recognizing what to walk away from — both bad-fit funders and outright scams. Watch for these signals.

• No fit in the grant history. The mission statement sounds right but the 990 shows they've never funded anything like your work, your size, or your region. Trust the data, not the brochure.
• "We do not accept unsolicited proposals." Stated plainly in many 990-PFs and guidelines. Applying anyway is wasted effort; these funders give only to organizations they approach.
• Mismatched award size. Their grants top out at $10,000 and you need $150,000 (or vice versa). The number has to be realistic on both sides.
• Reporting burden you can't carry. A federal award with monthly financial reporting can cost more in staff time than it provides if you lack the back office. Match the compliance load to your capacity.
• Grant "fees" to apply. Legitimate grantmakers never charge you to apply or ask for payment to "release" awarded funds. Any request for an application fee, a processing fee, or your bank login is a scam — government and foundation grants are free to apply for.
• Unsolicited "you've been awarded a grant" messages. Real funders don't award grants you never applied for, especially via social media DMs or texts. Treat these as fraud.
• Mission drift to chase money. If you find yourself reshaping your program to fit a funder rather than the reverse, the grant may cost more than it's worth. Restricted funding that pulls you off-mission is a slow red flag, not a fast one.

Common mistakes

• Searching only by keyword on one database. The best prospects — small family foundations — often have no website and show up only in 990 filings. Keyword search alone misses them.
• Skipping the 990. The mission statement tells you what a funder says; the 990-PF tells you what they do. Qualifying a funder without reading their grant list is guessing.
• Ignoring geography. A perfect program match that doesn't fund your region is a guaranteed decline. Check the giving area first, before anything else.
• Chasing federal money too early. New, small organizations routinely sink weeks into federal applications they have little chance of winning, when a local community foundation would have funded them faster. Build a track record locally first.
• Confusing volume with strategy. Fifty scattershot applications to poorly qualified funders will lose to ten well-matched ones. The funnel exists to make you say no.
• No pipeline, only deadlines. Reacting to whatever deadline is nearest, with no rolling calendar, guarantees rushed proposals and missed opportunities. Map the whole year.
• Forgetting SAM.gov lead time. Discovering on the day of a federal deadline that your entity registration lapsed — or was never completed — is a self-inflicted loss. Register and renew early.
• Treating DAFs as a place to apply. You don't apply to donor-advised funds; you cultivate the donors behind them and make giving easy. Pitching the sponsor wastes effort.

Next steps

Finding grants is a repeatable process: know the six sources, search each with the right tool, qualify every prospect against the checklist (with the 990 as your evidence), and roll the survivors into a 12-month pipeline. Start small — pull one community foundation's grantee list, read two 990-PFs, and qualify five prospects this week. That single habit will reshape your fundraising more than any template.

Once you've found a funder worth pursuing, the work shifts to writing — and the fit you discovered in research has to come through on the page. These guides cover what comes next:

• Grant writing for nonprofits: a beginner's guide — how funding works and what makes an application win.
• How to apply for federal grants — the SAM.gov and Grants.gov mechanics, step by step.
• What is a letter of inquiry (LOI)? — the short pitch many funders require before a full proposal.
• How to write a statement of need — make the funder see the problem, and the fit, immediately.
• How to write grant goals and objectives — map your outcomes to what the funder measures.
• How to write a grant budget — show the money exactly where the funder expects it.

And when you're ready to draft, GrantSage turns your project details and a funder's stated priorities into a funder-aligned narrative section in seconds — so the alignment you found in research lands on the page. It's free to try.

FAQ

Where do nonprofits actually find grants?

In four broad places: government portals (Grants.gov and SAM.gov for federal, plus state and city portals), foundation directories (Candid's Foundation Directory, Instrumentl, GrantStation), public IRS Form 990 filings (via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer or Candid), and your own local community foundation. The best prospects are usually funders already giving to organizations like yours, in your region — which 990s reveal for free.

Are there free grant databases, or do I have to pay?

Plenty are free. Grants.gov and SAM.gov cost nothing for federal opportunities, ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer lets you read any foundation's 990 at no charge, Candid offers a free Foundation Directory Quick Start and free access at Funding Information Network libraries, and most community foundations and state portals are free. Paid tools like Candid's full Foundation Directory or Instrumentl save time with deeper data and match alerts, but you can run real prospect research on free sources alone.

What is a Form 990 and why does it matter for finding grants?

The Form 990 is the annual information return tax-exempt organizations file with the IRS, and it is public. Private foundations file the 990-PF, which lists every grant they paid that year — recipient, amount, and purpose — in Part XV. Reading a funder's recent 990s shows you exactly who they fund, how much they give, and whether an organization like yours is a realistic match. It is the single most useful free prospect-research source.

How do I know if a funder is a good fit for my organization?

Check six things, in order: program priorities (does your work match their stated focus?), geography (do they fund your area?), typical grant size (is the average award meaningful and realistic for you?), eligibility (do you meet 501(c)(3), location, or budget requirements?), how to apply and the deadline (open application, invite-only, or letter of inquiry first?), and prior grantees (have they funded organizations like yours, per their 990?). A funder must pass all six to be worth a full application.

How many grant prospects should I be working at once?

A healthy pipeline for a small nonprofit is roughly 15 to 25 qualified prospects mapped across a rolling 12-month calendar, with deadlines, award ranges, and internal prep milestones tracked. Prospect research is a funnel: start with a long list of maybe-fits, narrow to a few dozen strong fits, then investigate the finalists deeply. Quality of fit beats volume every time — ten well-matched applications will out-raise fifty scattershot ones.

Should I apply for federal grants as a small or new organization?

Sometimes, but go in with open eyes. Federal grants are large and competitive, require SAM.gov registration (which can take a week or more and renews annually), and demand heavy reporting. New organizations with little track record often have better odds with local community foundations and corporate giving programs first, then build toward federal funding once they have outcomes to show. See our guide on how to apply for federal grants for the mechanics.