Grant prospecting for small nonprofits: find, qualify, decide

Grant prospecting is the work before the writing: finding funders and opportunities, checking whether you qualify and fit, and deciding which ones get your hours. For a small nonprofit, it is often the part that gets squeezed, because writing has a deadline and prospecting does not. The result is a pipeline that is either empty or full of long shots.

This guide breaks prospecting into three steps, gives you a scoring template to qualify a prospect in a few minutes, and covers the options for getting the work done when nobody on staff has time for it.

Step 1: Find

Prospects come from two directions.

Open opportunities: grants with a published call and deadline. These come from Grants.gov for federal grants, your state's listings, and the grants pages of foundations and companies. Our guide to grant alerts covers where each is published and how to hear when one opens.

Funders without an open call right now: foundations that fund work like yours but are between cycles, or that give by invitation. You find these through research:

• Peer organizations. Annual reports and websites of organizations like yours usually list their funders.
• Form 990-PF filings. Private foundations list the grants they paid each year. Reading a few years of a foundation's filings, free on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer, shows who it funds, where, and how much.
• Your board and volunteers. Ask who they know at local foundations and companies. A warm introduction matters most with funders that do not accept unsolicited proposals.

Both kinds go into one list. Open opportunities need a decision this month; the others need a relationship and a note to check back.

Step 2: Qualify

Most prospects should be dropped quickly. Read in this order, and stop at the first failure:

1. Geography. Does the funder give where you work?
2. Applicant type. Does it fund 501(c)(3) public charities like you? Some fund only government agencies, schools, or organizations it invites.
3. Program fit. Does it fund what you do, in its own words, not just a loosely related category?
4. Size. Is the typical grant worth the hours, and does the funder give to organizations of your budget? Its 990-PF shows the range it actually pays.
5. Timing. Is the next deadline far enough away to write a good application?

A scoring template

For prospects that pass the five checks, score fit so you can rank them. Keep it simple; the point is to compare, not to be precise.

Funder:
Program or cycle:
Source link:
Deadline (or "rolling" / "invitation only"):
Amount range published (or "not stated"):

Geography matches            yes / no
Applicant type matches       yes / no
Program fit                  strong / good / weak
Gives at our size            yes / unsure / no
Relationship                 existing / warm intro possible / none
Hours to apply (estimate)    under 5 / 5-15 / over 15

Decision: apply / cultivate / pass
Why, in one sentence:
Next step and owner:

Strong program fit with a manageable application goes to the top. A strong fit that needs a relationship goes into "cultivate", with a date to reach out. Weak fit is a pass, however large the grant.

Step 3: Decide and keep the pipeline short

Prospecting fails when the list grows faster than the decisions. Set a rule: every prospect gets a decision within a week of being found. Apply, cultivate, or pass, and write one sentence on why.

A healthy pipeline for a small organization is short. Rather than 80 possibles, aim for a handful you are actively writing for, a handful you are cultivating, and a record of what you passed on and why. The record saves time next year, when the same funder's cycle opens again.

Put the ones you apply for in your grant tracking spreadsheet with the deadline, the owner and the next step.

Talking to program officers

When the guidelines leave fit unclear, and the funder invites questions, a short email to the program officer is often the best use of ten minutes. Ask one specific question: whether a program like yours, in your area, at your budget, fits the current cycle. A clear no saves you an application; a yes, or a suggestion, improves the one you write. Some funders ask applicants not to contact staff, so read the guidelines first.

Who does the prospecting

Small organizations usually handle this one of four ways:

• The director does it in the evenings. It works until it does not; prospecting is the first thing dropped in a busy month.
• A part-time researcher or virtual assistant checks sources, fills in the template, and keeps the tracker. You still make the decisions. The handoff works best with a written list of sources and the qualifying checks above.
• A grant consultant does research and often writing too, usually at a higher cost per hour, and is most useful for large or complex applications.
• Software, from research databases with funder profiles to tools that send a short list of matched opportunities. Our guide to grant alerts has a checklist for testing one.

Whichever you choose, keep the decisions with the people who know the programs. Prospecting can be delegated; judging fit against what you actually do is harder to hand off.

Common mistakes

• Prospecting by keyword alone. "Youth" matches hundreds of funders that would never fund your youth program.
• Ignoring size. A funder whose smallest grant is larger than your budget is not a prospect.
• Skipping the record. Without one sentence on why you passed, you will research the same funder again next year.
• Waiting for the perfect fit. Good fits with a manageable application, sent on time, beat perfect fits you never get to.

Grant Weekly handles the find-and-qualify part for open opportunities. Each Monday it emails a short ranked list of newly open grants from Grants.gov, California's state listings and the funder pages you choose to watch, checked against your mission, geography and size, with the amount, deadline and eligibility where the funder publishes them, and the reasons each one fits. Marking one "Not a fit" stops that funder from showing again.