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To expand their grant seeking, nonprofit executives often ask for more funding prospects — but more doesn’t always mean better. Applying to every possible grant opportunity, even ones that aren’t a good fit, wastes time and money and risks alienating funders.
You are much better off with a smaller number of opportunities that are well-aligned to your organization’s programs than a long list of opportunities for which your organization won’t be competitive.
According to Meredith Burke Hammons, PhD, GPC, of Burke Hammons Professional Grant services in Smyrna, Georgia, tools such as Instrumentl, Foundation Directory, GrantStation, and even AI chatbots make prospect research easier, but it is a time-consuming and nuanced process to use them effectively. If you don’t take the time to research each potential funder thoroughly, you end up with a list of 100 dubious prospects.
Some people only look at keywords, but those only tell you so much. If you are looking for funding prospects for a Makerspace at a public library, it doesn’t make sense to include a grant that only PTAs are eligible for and one for a program to encourage dialog between citizens of the U.S. and Japan.
To narrow down lists like that, look for the following:
- Eligibility: type of organization, geographic restrictions, any funder-specific guidelines.
- Funder’s specific programmatic priorities: e.g. if housing is a priority, targeting rural or urban areas, for specific populations such as veterans or people living with HIV.
- For national funders, is there something truly compelling about the client’s mission or location that would make the funder particularly interested in this client?
- Funding history:
- Does the funder have a history of funding the same, specific geographic area? This is different from eligibility, because funders will often state that they fund all over the US but have only ever funded in Georgia or say that they fund in Georgia but have only ever funded in the Savannah area.
- Does the funder have a history of funding organizations with similar missions?
- In the past five years, how many new organizations have been funded?
- How many grants did they fund per year?
- Finances: How much money does the funder have to grant? Do they appear to be spending down their assets?
- The application process: If it is invitation-only, put the funder in a separate section to let the client know that an application first requires building a relationship with the funder to secure an invitation, which takes intentional effort and time.
This process takes hours of diligent work, but it would take many more hours to apply for all of those 100 original prospects. This process provides a much better return on the organization’s investment, and the thoughtful approach demonstrates that they are reliable partners to the philanthropic community.
