How to find foundations that fund organizations like yours

Why peer-first beats keyword-first

Keyword searches return funders whose guidelines sound right. Grant schedules show who actually wrote checks. A foundation that gave to three organizations like yours last year is a far stronger lead than one whose mission statement happens to share your vocabulary, because past giving is the single best predictor of future giving.

The raw material is public. Every foundation that files a Form 990 or 990-PF discloses its grants: recipient, amount, and often purpose. The question is not access. It is reading time.

The peer-first method, step by step

1. 1Name five to ten organizations that do work like yours. Match on cause, budget size, and geography. These are your true peers, and their funders are your best prospects.
2. 2Pull each peer’s funders from the record. Grants appear in the funder’s filing, not the recipient’s: Schedule I of a Form 990 and Part XV of a 990-PF name every grantee and amount.
3. 3Cut the list by fit. Grant sizes in your range, geography they actually fund, and openness: does the funder add new grantees each year, or fund the same roster every cycle?
4. 4Rank what is left. A funder that backs several of your peers is a stronger lead than one that backs a single peer once. Overlap is the signal.
5. 5Check the latest filing before you write. Confirm the giving level held up, and read the application notes in a 990-PF’s Part XV: some funders state plainly that they only fund preselected organizations.

By hand, or with the reading done for you

You can run this method manually. Budget a few hours per peer: find each funder filing, locate the grant schedule, and copy the rows out. For a list of eight peers with a dozen funders each, that is a real week of work, and it goes stale as new filings land.

This is the work SecretAgent990 automates. The Grant Investigator starts from a name or EIN, finds the peers, reads every funder filing behind them, and ends in an Action Report: funders ranked so you can follow the leads, each figure linked to the exact 990 it came from.

What to watch out for

• Filing lag. 990s surface months after a fiscal year closes. Treat the record as a trailing indicator and verify anything material against the source filing.
• Preselection. Some foundations do not accept unsolicited proposals and say so in Part XV. Respect it, and spend your time on the funders who add new names.
• Blank is not zero. An organization that reports no figure did not necessarily report zero. Honest analysis excludes blanks rather than counting them as nothing.