Grant alerts for nonprofits: set them up so they stay useful

A grant alert is any message that tells you a funding opportunity has opened: an email from a federal or state listing, a funder's newsletter, a saved search in a paid database, or a note that a funder's web page changed. Set up well, alerts replace hours of searching. Set up badly, they become one more inbox folder nobody opens, and the grant you wanted closes while it sits there unread.

This guide covers where grant alerts come from, how to set each kind up for a small nonprofit, and a weekly routine that turns a pile of alerts into a few decisions.

Before you sign up for anything

An alert is only as good as the filter behind it. Write down the facts a funder checks first, and use them in every signup and saved search:

• Where you work: state, and the counties or cities you serve.
• What you do: your program areas in plain words, the way a funder would describe them ("after-school tutoring", "food security", "youth mentoring").
• Your status: most opportunities open to nonprofits ask for 501(c)(3) public charity status.
• Your size: your annual budget, roughly, and the smallest grant worth the hours an application takes.

Then pick one place for alerts to land: a shared mailbox, a mail folder with a filter, or a single person's inbox. Alerts spread across three people's inboxes get read by none of them.

Where grant alerts come from

Federal: Grants.gov

Grants.gov is the federal government's listing of competitive grant opportunities, and searching it is free. It can also email you: you can subscribe to updates about new opportunities, and an account lets you save a search and follow particular opportunities so that changes to them reach you. The subscription choices change from time to time, so check the site's current options.

The useful filters for a nonprofit are eligibility (nonprofits with 501(c)(3) status), category and agency. Without them, a federal alert is mostly opportunities for states, universities and tribal governments.

State listings

Some states publish a central listing of state grants, and some of those let you sign up for updates or save a search. Many states have no central listing, and each agency posts its own grants. In that case, find the three or four agencies closest to your work (health, education, human services, arts) and look for an email list on each one's funding page. Federal money that reaches nonprofits through a state program shows up here, not on Grants.gov.

Foundations and community foundations

Foundation grants are the hardest to get alerts for, because each foundation publishes on its own site and on its own schedule, and many never announce a cycle anywhere else.

• Your community foundation. Most regions of the US have one. Sign up for its newsletter and any separate list for grant announcements; many announce competitive cycles there first.
• Local family and private foundations. Some have newsletters or announcement lists. Many have neither and simply update their grants page. Note that many private foundations do not accept unsolicited proposals; their sites usually say so.
• Associations of grantmakers. Regional groups of funders sometimes publish calendars or newsletters of open calls in their area.

Companies

Corporate giving runs through company foundations and local giving programs, and very few send alerts. The best prospects for a small nonprofit are usually local banks, utilities, hospitals and large employers. Their community or giving pages say when applications open, so these need watching rather than subscribing.

Saved searches in grant databases

Paid grant databases and search tools usually let you save a search and get an email when new results match. These alerts are as good as the search behind them: a search for "youth" in your state can return dozens of results a week. Test one during a free trial before you rely on it (see the checklist below).

Watching pages that never send alerts

For funders that do not send anything, you have two options. One is to visit their grants pages on a schedule. The other is a page-change monitor, a tool that checks a web page and emails you when it changes. A monitor tells you that something changed, not what. A new footer or a staff photo triggers it too, so someone still has to look.

Google Alerts can catch news that mentions a funder by name. It finds press releases and local stories, which sometimes announce a new grant program, but it does not watch a funder's grants page.

Keeping alerts from taking over

More alerts is not better. A few rules keep them useful:

1. Filter at the source. Use eligibility, category and location filters in every signup. An alert you delete unread every week is worse than no alert, because it trains you to skip the folder.
2. Route them to one place. Use a mail filter or a label so that grant alerts land together, and check that folder on a fixed day.
3. Prune every quarter. Unsubscribe from anything that has not sent a single relevant opportunity in three months.
4. Watch the funders that matter most. Your community foundation and the five or ten local funders who fund work like yours deserve a direct check even if they also send newsletters.

A weekly routine for triaging grant alerts

Alerts only help if someone decides on what they bring. Thirty minutes once a week is enough for most small organizations:

1. Open the alert folder and the pages you watch (10 minutes). List what is new since last week.
2. Judge fit in order (15 minutes). For each opportunity, stop at the first check it fails: geography, applicant type, program area, size, deadline. Most will fail one of the first two.
3. Decide (5 minutes). Apply, pass, or ask the program officer a question. Put the ones you will pursue in your grant tracking spreadsheet and their deadlines on your grant calendar.

Our guide to grant prospecting goes further on judging fit quickly.

A checklist for any alert you rely on

Run this test on any alert source before you trust it to catch the grants you care about:

1. Look back. Pick three grants you already know about from the last year. Would this alert have told you about them, and in time?
2. Count what fits. Over the first two weeks, how many alerts could you actually apply for?
3. Check the dates. For a few opportunities, compare the deadline in the alert with the one on the funder's own page.
4. Time it. How long does it take each week to get from the alerts to a short list you would act on?
5. Know what it misses. Write down which funders it does not cover, and keep checking those yourself.

How Grant Weekly fits in

Grant Weekly works as one combined alert. Each week it checks new federal grants open to nonprofits, California state grants, and the foundation and corporate pages you choose to watch, scores them against your mission, place and size, and emails a short ranked list each Monday with the amount, deadline and eligibility where the funder publishes them, and why each one fits. When it finds nothing that fits, the email says so instead of padding the list. It does not cover state listings outside California, and it only watches the funder pages you add.