Grant and Prospect Research Basics
It doesn’t matter how many foundations, individual donors, local and regional governments, and other funders would believe in your organization and be willing to support it financially if they don’t know you.
The first step is to research grants, opportunities and funders. This grant research requires a level of planning and consideration that no software can completely provide. However, several tools on the market may help you find and research funders while also making tracking your outcomes easier.
Online search databases, for example, are essential for swiftly finding new prospective grants by listing local and national foundations categorized by interest area, saving you time. Some Web-based services can also assist you in locating local persons who are likely to make significant contributions to your organization.
Foundation Grant Research
At its most basic level, grant prospect research entails two activities: investigating various foundations’ grant cycles, giving histories, and proposal requirements, and handling your organization’s applications to each foundation. The former requires keeping and managing data, defining a list of foundations that might give to your group and determining what types of organizations they’ve funded in the past and with what size donations.
Grant Research Tools
Websites like the Foundation Center’s Foundation Directory Online database or GrantStation are essential when researching donation histories and grant cycles. They let you browse through foundation data in great detail based on a range of criteria, such as prior gifts, geographic area served, and giving interests. An animal rescue shelter, for example, might find a list of foundations committed to animal welfare or with a history of supporting other shelters and animal rescue groups. To use at your own location, a monthly subscription to the Foundation Center database is required; the basic package costs roughly $20 per month, and full access costs around $180 per month. You can also access this database through a network of Funding Information Network partners.
A yearly subscription to GrantStation costs $699; however, your state organization may be able to provide you with a significant discount. For qualified organizations and libraries, GrantStation is also available through TechSoup’s product catalog. Many regional or local philanthropy centers, on the other hand, provide access as a benefit of membership or for free on-site in their “grant research libraries.”
Furthermore, area grantmakers’ associations can be excellent sources of information (visit the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers for a complete list). The majority of grantmaker groups, often known as philanthropy centers, will maintain a publicly accessible list of foundations in a given geographic area. Some are only available in print, but others have online databases. You can also search for grantmaking organizations based on their objectives, such as Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media, or other criteria like the Association of Small Foundations. Searching these organizations’ member lists will help you find possible grant recipients.
For many groups, federal grants are another important source of revenue. While these funds aren’t listed in private or corporate foundation databases, Grants.gov allows you to search for federal grant possibilities in the United States. The majority of state and local grant information can be obtained on your municipality’s website. A simple Web search can also help you learn about grants that organizations like yours have gotten and for which yours might be eligible. On their websites or in annual reports, many organizations mention foundation funders.
While compiling a list of foundations, look into their giving histories and grantmaking capacities. Past grantees, the overall budget, awarding capacity, and the value of past grants can all be found in tax records. You’ll find a lot of this information in the Foundation Center database, but you might need to explore elsewhere to find everything you need. GuideStar allows users to browse a database of over five million IRS Form 990s, which the government uses to keep track of financial information regarding nonprofits.
Tools for Managing the Grants Cycle
You’ll need a location to keep information about potential funders as you begin to collect it. Spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel or Google Drive can be great low-budget solutions for keeping foundation prospect lists for smaller organizations with limited funds and NGOs just getting started with grant research. Create columns to capture foundation names, website connections, giving interests, possible giving capacities, and dates of RFPs (requests for proposals) and their due dates, if you choose this way. If your organization’s internal proposal deadline differs from the foundation’s deadline, make a note of both.
A subscription to the Foundation Center database includes access to potential funders management software, however access at public locations does not include this feature.
Most donor management systems, such as those included in Idealware’s Consumers Guide to Donor Management Systems, allow you to handle your foundation list the same way you would any other giving prospect, including tracking RFP and proposal dates and proposal status and processes.
Additionally, calendaring or task-management software that can operate as a to-do list can help supplement your deadline- and submission-date records to ensure you don’t miss any deadlines.
Individual Prospect Research
Major gift prospects, who are often wealthy individuals in your geographic area or in the community related to your issue, who have the ability and want to donate to your organization, can be just as valuable as foundations.
You’ll need to make a list of current and potential donors before beginning your research.
- Begin using your current donor list. Who has previously been a generous donor? Your investigation might disclose that these people are more generous than you thought.
- Request names for the list from your board of directors and other supporters.
- Identify a few prominent persons in your neighborhood who aren’t on your list but have a history of donating to other charities.
Technology can greatly assist you in better understanding these donors’ giving potential. Once you’ve compiled your prospect list, you’ll need to construct a profile for each of your potential contributors that contains contact and giving information as well as their financial capability.
Public data, such as tax filings, property prices, board memberships, and publicly-held stock portfolios, contain a lot of this information for free. It may be possible to manually search for these entries, depending on the size of your prospect list and the time available to your employees.
Documents, such as property-value data from the assessor’s office, may require you to make a personal request; this is typically free; however, photocopies may incur a small fee. (Some high-level contributors may hold property in several states or municipalities, making record-keeping more complicated.)
Wealth-Screening Services
You could use a wealth-screening database to save staff time, which is more valuable to many nonprofits than the cost of one of these Web-based services—especially if you have a longer list of donors. Donor Search, WealthEngine, LexisNexis Development Professionals, and Blackbaud’s Target Analytics are four of the most extensively utilized wealth-screening databases.
You can submit a list of possible donors to get an estimate of their individual giving potential with all four. This is comparable to how you would conduct your research on specific prospects.
These services pull data from databases and public records that you have access to. The difference is the time saved by being able to run a list of thousands of names at once rather than searching each one individually and a fine-tuned ability to know where to seek precise information.
While all of these technologies are pricey (prices are only available through vendor quotes), WealthEngine and LexisNexis are more expensive than DonorSearch and Target Analytics. You can run huge lists at once or smaller donor lists as needed because they usually run on a subscription basis. These firms will also filter your prospect list to find the most likely donors, such as the top 1% or top 100 prospects. These services tend to use the same sources with minor differences because the information used to generate these donor profiles comes from public records.
When choosing a tool, make a trial list from the ones you’re considering by utilizing a few names for which you already have up-to-date profiles to rate the tools’ accuracy.
Now That You Have Your List
You’ll need a way to keep track of and manage your prospects, just like you did with your foundation research. This should be done with the help of a donor management database, which will allow you to keep track of each prospect’s giving history, asset pools, giving interests, and the chance of contributing again. Many donor databases can also handle pledges and planned or recurring gifts, allowing you to track significant contributions over months or years, which can be a valuable source of consistent financing.
It’s time to start appending the entries currently in your database once you’ve compiled a list of viable prospects and put them through wealth screening. Suppose you’ve used a wealth-screening tool before. You’ll notice that some of them—for example, WealthEngine or Blackbaud’s Target Analytics—integrate with your existing donor database or CRM, while others require you to import the list manually. Before you import the listed wholesale into your system, you should double-check the profiles you acquire from these tools—to make sure, for example, that the John Smith they’ve identified as your most likely candidate is the John Smith you think it is.
Remember that these leads are a beginning point for nurturing new, high-value donors, not a piggy bank. If you don’t already have a relationship with your top potential contributors, find a means to introduce yourself and spend some time getting to know them before asking them for thousands of dollars. Your investigation may also reveal that your current long-term contributors have more capacity than anticipated. You can ask them to boost their contributions because you already have a relationship with them.
Conclusion
As you can see, technology exists to assist you in finding eligible funds and tracking their grant cycles, but software to replace the human element—for example, to write your bids for you—is still lacking. The same is true for your prospects. Wealth-screening services can find facts for your list fast that would take hours and hours of staff time to find, but they can’t sit down with each prospect and create a relationship with them. A seasoned fundraiser with the expertise and skills to make solid proposals and/or wine and dine potential contributors is still required. It’s a smart idea to employ high-tech databases and wealth-screening services to help you discover the door, but getting your foot in the door is still your responsibility.
Major-gift fundraising often requires a different approach than individual gift campaigns.
Learn more by attending the Sunshine Certificate in Nonprofit Management class on Grant Writing and Evaluation on Monday, May 23, 2022 from 5:30 to 9:30 pm, and Campaigning to Potential-Part I (Sponsorship and Fundraising) on Monday, June 20 at 5:30 pm.
Source: Kyle H. Andrei – https://nonprofitquarterly.org/nonprofit-grants-prospect-grant-research/5
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