A board member of a nonprofit recently asked us a very common question: “How do I find grants for my nonprofit? Where do I even start?”
If you’re new to nonprofit fundraising, finding grant money can feel overwhelming.
We’ve been sharing a lot of grant tips and tools lately, so we figured it was time to round them up into one go-to resource. In this guide, we’ll take you step by step through the full process of finding grant dollars for your nonprofit—from how to decide which programs need funding to how to “break in” with new foundation funders.
1) Understand Which Grants You Want to Find for Your Nonprofit
Before you open up a single grant research database, you need to take two critical steps.
First, make sure your organization is “grant-ready.” Being grant-ready means your nonprofit has the administrative, governance, financial, leadership, and programmatic know-how to win and deliver on grants.
You can work through our grant readiness assessment to see if your organization is fully prepared to apply for and manage grants. The tool also provides you with clear instructions on how to prepare and organize the many “attachments” that nonprofit funders want—like tax documents, financial information, and board governance information.
Second, use our pro tips to prepare for finding well-matched grant prospects by mapping your organization’s funding needs and prioritizing what you want to raise funds for.
We know it can be tempting to skip this step and just dive into finding and applying for grants. But the reality is you can’t raise money for “everything” at once. The more focused and strategic you are in your approach to finding grants, the more successful you will be in securing grant dollars.
2) Find Grants for Nonprofits Using Pro Research Tools
Once you know how much funding you need and for what, it’s time to dive into grant research. There are a LOT of grant research databases out there. They each work a bit differently and come in a wide range of fee levels.
To find the right grant database for your needs, start by checking out our roundups of free grant research tools and premium grant research databases. Then, pick a database and get to work finding funders. For example, you can search for:
🗺️ Funders with a geographic match—meaning the funder focuses specifically on the geography in which you work. Every foundation is different, so geography can be as broad as a multi-state region of the U.S. or as specific as a single city or even neighborhood.
🫰🏼Funders with a programmatic match—meaning the funder explicitly focuses on supporting your organization’s programming types. For example, if your nonprofit works on literacy, a literacy-focused funder could be a good match.
💰Funders with an aligned grantmaking history—meaning the funder makes grants to nonprofits that are similar to yours. In many grant databases, you can actually look up grants made to other nonprofits and then delve into their funders.
By the end of the grant research process, you ideally want to find at least 10-15 potential grant prospects. Then, it’s time to narrow down the list.
Want support to find the right grants today? We support a few organizations
with our Grant Research Package each month.
3) Dig Deeper on Top Grant Prospects
When it comes to grant applications, it’s almost always better to apply to a handful of well-matched grant funders rather than dozens of poor fits.
So, once you find potential grant prospects in a research database, you’ll still want to do one more level of research. You can do this by reviewing a foundation’s website and by reading their 990 tax returns. Our guide to utilizing 990s in grant research walks you through exactly what to look for in a foundation’s 990.
In addition, there are two things you might see in your grant research that give you pause:
In addition, there are two things you might see in your grant research that give you pause:
👉🏼 Funders that do not accept unsolicited proposals. The first time you see this, you might be inclined to put the grant prospect in the “no match” pile. But if the funder is otherwise a perfect match, we recommend following these key steps to build relationships with funders that only make grants to pre-selected nonprofits.
👉🏼 Grants that require matching funds. Matching requirements can also feel daunting at first, but they don’t have to be. In our guide to matching grants, we outline how to evaluate matching requirements and how to easily find matching funds.
4) Create a Grant Funder Outreach Strategy
With your list of well-matched grant prospects in hand, it’s now time to start building relationships!
Rather than submitting a cold letter of inquiry or grant proposal, reaching out to grant prospects first can significantly increase your chance of successful funding. To simplify this step, our guide to communicating with foundations explains how to find the right person to contact, the best questions to ask, and even includes sample language you can adapt for your own outreach.
5) Start Writing and Submitting Grant Proposals for Your Nonprofit!
Surprisingly, one of the final steps in finding grants for your nonprofit is submitting a grant proposal. In an ideal scenario, after your initial outreach and perhaps an introductory call, a funder will invite you to apply for a grant. When this happens, it means the funder thinks you might be a match for their funding priorities.
Instead of writing a new grant proposal for every single funder, we recommend creating a grant template for your priority programs. Note that these should be the same programs you prioritized for your grant research!
You can grab our free grant template writing guide here and learn more about how to use your grant template to save time.
Finally, you can check out our top grant writing tips. These are the tips we’ve compiled after raising hundreds of millions in grant dollars, so they are definitely worth a read!
We also support a few organizations with our Grant Research Package each month. So book your seat for this customized support, and let us simplify your life today.
