How to find grants for nonprofits

Three doors, and they are documented in three different places. Only one of them leaves a usable paper trail.

This guide covers the first door. It is the one where public data sits unused, because nobody needs a subscription to read it. Federal funding is a different search with different rules, and the grant management software page covers how the two run side by side.

Most advice starts with a search box. The step that decides your results comes earlier: knowing what to look for.

1. Community foundations covering your service area. They file a 990-PF and many also list past recipients on their own site.
2. Family foundations in your state. ProPublica lets you filter private foundations by state and sort by total assets.
3. Funders named on your peers' acknowledgment pages. A peer's own return does not name its funders, but its website usually does.
4. Every funder you have already written to, including the declines. A no from three years ago is a data point about timing.

Collect 40 to 60 names before you read a single filing. Ten to 15 will survive the fit test below, and that is a working list.

The filing is evidence of past behavior. It is not an invitation, and it is not current.

Three reading rules carry most of the value.

• A blank deadline line is silence, not a closed door. Check the funder's own site before you decide.
• Tax year 2021 and later put the grant list on Part XIV. Returns for 2020 and earlier used Part XV for the same information.
• Filings run behind. A 990-PF is due four and a half months after the fiscal year closes, with an automatic six-month extension, and free indexes lag further. Assume a year.

The mechanics of reading one filing line by line belong to how to read a 990-PF. What follows is the part most guides skip: how to use a stack of filings to choose where to apply.

This is the method. It takes about ten minutes per foundation and it answers the question a directory cannot: does this funder already pay organizations like ours?

1. Open the grant list (Part XIV, line 3a) and read it in amount order.
2. Find the recipients your own size. Pull a recipient's revenue from its own Form 990. Look for organizations within one budget band of yours.
3. Check geography and purpose in the address and purpose columns, not in the foundation's mission statement.
4. Compare your request with the median grant, not the largest grant.
5. Read line 2 to see whether terms were published and who to contact.

One shortcut does not work, and it comes up in every conversation about this: a nonprofit's own 990 never lists who funds it. Schedule I reports grants the filer gave. The lookup runs one direction, foundation to grantee.

Two filings, same year, two different answers

Read together, they make the case for doing this work.

The Nord Family Foundation paid $10,116,088 across 314 grants, with a median of $25,000 and a middle half running from $4,750 to $50,000. A $40,000 program request sits inside the normal range. The terms are published, the contact is a named person, and general operating support is a real category there rather than a hope. Geography is the binding constraint: 181 of those 314 grants went to Ohio organizations.

The Hyde and Watson Foundation looks just as open, with two application windows a year and a plain 501(c)(3) requirement. It paid $6,135,640 across 611 grants with a median of $10,000, and three grants reached $50,000. The purpose column is nearly all hard costs: buildings, renovations, equipment. A $100,000 program request is ten times the median and in the wrong category, even though the door is open.

A reader who checked only "do they accept applications" would have got the first one right and spent a month on the second.

Four tests, ten minutes, one verdict per funder. The thresholds are judgment rules, not published benchmarks.

Three possible verdicts: pursue now, steward this year when the funder fits but the timing or the ask does not, or park. Parking a funder is a decision, not a failure. It is how a list of 60 becomes a list of 12 you can actually serve.

Set your request size against your own budget before you compare it with theirs. The nonprofit budget template shows the functional split a funder will read in your proposal.

Looking for core costs rather than programs? See which 26 funders' filings show operating support: operational grants for nonprofits.

The method is correct and slow. A list of sixty funders, rebuilt by hand every year, goes stale within a quarter. The filing you read in March is a year old by the time you write in November.

That is the part Grants360 takes on. Federal opportunities from Grants.gov and foundation giving records from 990-PF filings sit in one place, with fit evidence you can inspect. Funder briefings pull the giving pattern, typical grant size, openness signals and recent grantees straight from the filings. Deadlines and progress live in the same pipeline as your applications.

What it will not do: decide for you, cover state or local funding yet, or submit anything on your behalf. A briefing is a starting point for your judgment, and every figure in it is checkable against the filing.

Once a shortlist exists, it needs a pipeline. The grant tracking spreadsheet is free and works whether or not you use anything else. If you are weighing tools, the grant discovery comparison and foundation research comparison lay out scope and pricing side by side.