When the Research Tools Don't Work: Grant Prospecting in a Difficult Moment

Grant research has never been easy. The work of identifying funders whose priorities align with a specific organization's mission, programs, and geographic focus requires patience, persistence, and a tolerance for dead ends. What it should not require is fighting the tools themselves.

And yet, for a growing number of development professionals, that is precisely what the work has become.

The Infrastructure Problem Nobody Talks About

There is an infrastructure layer underneath nonprofit fundraising that most people outside the sector never see: the databases, research platforms, and filing repositories that development staff use to identify prospective funders, understand their giving history, and assess whether a grant application is worth the time and effort of pursuing.

For decades, the dominant tool in this space was Foundation Directory Online, a comprehensive, searchable database of foundation giving that allowed researchers to filter by geography, focus area, grant size, and grantee type. It was not perfect. But it was robust, functional, and widely trusted. Development professionals built their prospecting workflows around it.

That platform has since been absorbed into a consolidated research environment under a different interface. And the consensus among many who use it regularly is that something important was lost in the transition. Search functionality that used to be straightforward has become cumbersome. Filters that should narrow results instead generate noise. Tasks that once took minutes now take significantly longer, or don't produce usable results at all.

The frustration is not a fringe position. It is widespread, and it is practical: when a researcher cannot efficiently identify which grants a specific foundation has made, or filter results to surface funders whose giving patterns match a particular project, the cost is not abstract. It is hours of staff time, missed opportunities, and grant applications that never get written because the research necessary to target them well was too difficult to complete.

What Grant Research Actually Requires

To understand why platform usability matters so much, it helps to understand what good grant prospecting actually involves.

The core task is not simply finding foundations that fund organizations like yours. It is finding foundations whose specific giving priorities align with a specific project or program, and then building enough understanding of that funder's patterns, interests, and requirements to write a credible proposal.

That means being able to answer questions like: What has this foundation funded in the last three years, and in what program areas? Has it funded organizations similar to ours? What grant sizes does it typically make? Does it accept unsolicited proposals? Who is the program contact?

A platform that makes these questions hard to answer is not a minor inconvenience. It is an obstacle to the core work of fundraising.

The challenge is compounded when grant descriptions in the underlying data are vague. A filing that lists a grant as "program support" without specifying which program tells a researcher almost nothing about topical fit. This is not a problem any single platform created. It reflects how grantmakers themselves report their activity in public filings, but it underscores why search and filter functionality matters so much. When descriptions are limited, the ability to search across multiple dimensions becomes even more important, not less.

The 990-PF: An Underused Free Resource

One of the more practical responses to platform frustration involves going directly to the source: IRS Form 990-PF, the annual filing required of all private foundations.

Part XV of the 990-PF contains the foundation's complete grant list for the filing year, including grantee names, amounts, and (when the foundation has provided them) grant purposes. For foundations that file electronically, these documents are text-searchable, which means a researcher can run a keyword search across a full year of grants in seconds.

The same section also contains application information: whether the foundation accepts unsolicited requests, application deadlines, and contact information. This is data that aggregated platforms sometimes omit or summarize incompletely. The original filing has it.

Part XIII of the 990-PF contains another signal that experienced grant researchers have learned to watch: undistributed income. Private foundations are generally required to distribute approximately five percent of their assets annually. When a foundation carries a shortfall from the prior year, it faces pressure to make up the difference within a defined period or pay an excise tax. This does not guarantee that a foundation will be receptive to a proposal, and the filings themselves run months to more than a year behind real time, but it can be a useful data point when assessing which foundations may have grant dollars actively in motion.

ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer (projects.propublica.org/nonprofits) provides free access to 990 filings going back many years. For a researcher willing to work directly with foundation returns, it is a capable alternative for tasks that aggregated platforms are making unnecessarily difficult.

The Broader Landscape

Candid, the organization that now operates the platform formerly known as Foundation Directory Online, represents a genuine and important effort to consolidate and provide access to philanthropic data. The underlying data is still there. The scope of what the platform could do remains significant.

The concern is not with the mission. It is with the gap between what the tool has historically been and what many users are experiencing today. Platforms that charge subscription fees, often substantial ones, particularly for smaller organizations, have an obligation to deliver functionality that justifies that cost. When the user experience degrades, the organizations most affected are typically those with the least capacity to absorb the lost productivity: small and mid-sized nonprofits whose development operations run on one or two people.

There are alternatives at various price points, some focused more on grant management than discovery, others building on IRS data in ways that surface different signals. None has yet replicated what Foundation Directory Online represented at its best. That gap is real, and the sector would benefit from naming it clearly.

What Development Staff Can Do in the Meantime

For organizations navigating this moment, a few practical approaches are worth building into the prospecting workflow:

Go direct to 990-PFs for specific foundation research. When the goal is understanding one funder's complete grant history, the foundation's own filing is often faster and more complete than a platform search. ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer makes these accessible at no cost.

Supplement platform searches with foundation websites. Many foundations publish their grant lists, current priorities, and application guidelines directly on their sites. This information is often more current than what any aggregated database reflects.

Build and maintain internal records. Every funder relationship, every grant received or declined, every conversation with a program officer represents institutional knowledge that no platform provides. Organizations that systematically document this information accumulate a prospecting resource that is more targeted than any general database.

Be realistic about what platform searches can and cannot tell you. Data quality in public filings varies significantly. A search result that shows "operating support" tells you a grant was made; it does not tell you why, or whether your organization would be competitive for similar support. The research that actually informs a strong proposal usually goes beyond what any database can provide.