In my last blog, I discussed the key foundation funding factors that determine who gets funded – and who doesn’t. These factors were determined based on foundation funding statements and demonstrated funding preferences identified through analysis we have conducted on over 10 million US foundation grants spanning 15 years. The identified factors are:
- Project or recipient location
- Grant size requested
- Giving interests
- Types of support
- Granting category
- New versus old recipient giving ratios
- Giving trends
Applicants ignoring even one of these when applying for funding may see their requests being rejected, so it is clear that the best approach is to evaluate every funder against all of the factors to maximize the probability of a successful fundraising campaign.
To start, in-depth foundation information is readily available through online searchable databases, such as and Foundation Center’s FoundationSearchFoundation Directory Online (FDO). In comparison, both provide tools to allow filtering of foundations by grant amount, location, area of interest, and funding category. While these filters are useful, they do not account for new versus old recipient giving ratios or giving trends. Recent testing of the filtering capabilities of both FDO and FoundationSearch prove both are adept at producing a “not so short” list of prospective funders for various search criteria. For example, a search for “scholarship” funding in New York state quickly produces an unsorted list of 1,670 potential funders in FoundationSearch using that product’s Grant Analyzer feature. This is certainly gets the fundraiser much closer to their goal of a targeted and ranked list of the most likely funders, but still leaves much work to do.
Foundation Center acknowledges the problem and provides a Prospect Worksheet, designed to “help you focus on funders whose priorities match those of your project.” The PDF form, which is four pages long, covers some of the key factors that should be evaluated when reviewing foundation prospects (again, see my previous blog post for an explanation of those factors). The form includes a section for determining whether the funder is a good match or not; you can make notes on subject focus, geographic limits, types of support, and populations served. The worksheet helps you organize your research, but it is still a manual process, and would need to be repeated for every foundation you want to evaluate. We tested this method, and average time to complete a sample worksheet was 30 minutes for a prospect. To complete a prospect sheet for each foundation in our example of a search for funders for scholarships in New York implies over 800 hours of additional research work, which is not feasible for most organizations.
One fundraiser who has founded her own research group, Jennifer Filla, has developed a method she calls “prospect prioritization” for corporate and foundation prospects. This involves creating a worksheet to record the client’s specific project criteria, and a rating legend to rate the funder prospects she’s evaluating against criteria including giving interest, location, and giving capacity. Through detailed interviews with the client, she determines which criteria are most important for the project, and weighs those more heavily in the scoring system. This is a step beyond the simple prospect worksheet, because it integrates a rating or scoring element, so that prospects can be weighed against each other and evaluated against specific criteria and then ranked. Although I have not tested this method, it appears to be a better method than the one offered by Foundation Directory Online in terms of ultimately producing a ranked list of funders. Unfortunately, this is still a manual method, requiring upwards of an hour’s analysis for each prospect, implying 1,600 hours of additional research work for the scholarship example.
FoundationSearch provides an analytic tool (My Best Prospects, or MBP) that greatly speeds up the review and ranking process—analysis of tens of thousands of foundation prospects is reduced to minutes rather than months of effort. Basically, this tool takes the prospect worksheet concept, integrates it with the rating/scoring aspect, and—here’s the best part--automates the entire process.
The tool allows you to input your specific project criteria, including project or recipient location, granting category, grant size, giving interests, and types of support. It then takes those criteria and evaluates every single funder in the database, and scores each of them on how well their past funding history matches your project criteria.
It also rates the funders’ granting histories, by checking out whether they’ve given more grants to new recipients as compared to old (i.e. repeat) recipients. And lastly, the tool also checks to see whether the funders are increasing or decreasing giving to your granting category through time. Some funders won’t make the cut, but the ones that do are ranked in descending order by relevancy to your project, and by funding frequency to your project criteria.
With the FoundationSearch tool, the best prospects are selected automatically for you, and presented in a ranked list of the 250 best prospects, with research profiles related to your particular project criteria for each.
So what does all of this analysis achieve? Good, timely funder analysis will increase your chances of getting funding by enabling you to focus on funders most likely to fund your project. Seems obvious, yes? For those who are time-pressed, narrowing the list down further to focus on funders with immediate deadlines can also benefit (see my previous blog post for a discussion on researching deadline opportunities). With foundation funding histories readily available through online searchable databases like FoundationSearch and Foundation Center, availability of information is no longer an issue. Efficient and accurate analysis becomes the challenge, and choosing the right tools to help with that analysis is key.
It would be interesting to hear how other fundraisers are dealing with evaluating foundation prospects…
(Please feel free to leave a comment, or link/re-post as you like. I look forward to your comments and feedback!)
- Project or recipient location
- Grant size requested
- Giving interests
- Types of support
- Granting category
- New versus old recipient giving ratios
- Giving trends
Applicants ignoring even one of these when applying for funding may see their requests being rejected, so it is clear that the best approach is to evaluate every funder against all of the factors to maximize the probability of a successful fundraising campaign.
To start, in-depth foundation information is readily available through online searchable databases, such as and Foundation Center’s FoundationSearchFoundation Directory Online (FDO). In comparison, both provide tools to allow filtering of foundations by grant amount, location, area of interest, and funding category. While these filters are useful, they do not account for new versus old recipient giving ratios or giving trends. Recent testing of the filtering capabilities of both FDO and FoundationSearch prove both are adept at producing a “not so short” list of prospective funders for various search criteria. For example, a search for “scholarship” funding in New York state quickly produces an unsorted list of 1,670 potential funders in FoundationSearch using that product’s Grant Analyzer feature. This is certainly gets the fundraiser much closer to their goal of a targeted and ranked list of the most likely funders, but still leaves much work to do.
Foundation Center acknowledges the problem and provides a Prospect Worksheet, designed to “help you focus on funders whose priorities match those of your project.” The PDF form, which is four pages long, covers some of the key factors that should be evaluated when reviewing foundation prospects (again, see my previous blog post for an explanation of those factors). The form includes a section for determining whether the funder is a good match or not; you can make notes on subject focus, geographic limits, types of support, and populations served. The worksheet helps you organize your research, but it is still a manual process, and would need to be repeated for every foundation you want to evaluate. We tested this method, and average time to complete a sample worksheet was 30 minutes for a prospect. To complete a prospect sheet for each foundation in our example of a search for funders for scholarships in New York implies over 800 hours of additional research work, which is not feasible for most organizations.
One fundraiser who has founded her own research group, Jennifer Filla, has developed a method she calls “prospect prioritization” for corporate and foundation prospects. This involves creating a worksheet to record the client’s specific project criteria, and a rating legend to rate the funder prospects she’s evaluating against criteria including giving interest, location, and giving capacity. Through detailed interviews with the client, she determines which criteria are most important for the project, and weighs those more heavily in the scoring system. This is a step beyond the simple prospect worksheet, because it integrates a rating or scoring element, so that prospects can be weighed against each other and evaluated against specific criteria and then ranked. Although I have not tested this method, it appears to be a better method than the one offered by Foundation Directory Online in terms of ultimately producing a ranked list of funders. Unfortunately, this is still a manual method, requiring upwards of an hour’s analysis for each prospect, implying 1,600 hours of additional research work for the scholarship example.
FoundationSearch provides an analytic tool (My Best Prospects, or MBP) that greatly speeds up the review and ranking process—analysis of tens of thousands of foundation prospects is reduced to minutes rather than months of effort. Basically, this tool takes the prospect worksheet concept, integrates it with the rating/scoring aspect, and—here’s the best part--automates the entire process.
The tool allows you to input your specific project criteria, including project or recipient location, granting category, grant size, giving interests, and types of support. It then takes those criteria and evaluates every single funder in the database, and scores each of them on how well their past funding history matches your project criteria.
It also rates the funders’ granting histories, by checking out whether they’ve given more grants to new recipients as compared to old (i.e. repeat) recipients. And lastly, the tool also checks to see whether the funders are increasing or decreasing giving to your granting category through time. Some funders won’t make the cut, but the ones that do are ranked in descending order by relevancy to your project, and by funding frequency to your project criteria.
With the FoundationSearch tool, the best prospects are selected automatically for you, and presented in a ranked list of the 250 best prospects, with research profiles related to your particular project criteria for each.
So what does all of this analysis achieve? Good, timely funder analysis will increase your chances of getting funding by enabling you to focus on funders most likely to fund your project. Seems obvious, yes? For those who are time-pressed, narrowing the list down further to focus on funders with immediate deadlines can also benefit (see my previous blog post for a discussion on researching deadline opportunities). With foundation funding histories readily available through online searchable databases like FoundationSearch and Foundation Center, availability of information is no longer an issue. Efficient and accurate analysis becomes the challenge, and choosing the right tools to help with that analysis is key.
It would be interesting to hear how other fundraisers are dealing with evaluating foundation prospects…
(Please feel free to leave a comment, or link/re-post as you like. I look forward to your comments and feedback!)