How to Find Nonprofit Grant Data (Who's Funding Whom)

One of the most common questions in the nonprofit world is deceptively simple: who is funding what?

Grant writers need to know which foundations fund organizations like theirs. Development directors need to identify prospective major donors. Researchers and journalists need to follow the money. And all of them are working with the same underlying data source (IRS 990 filings) whether they know it or not.

The problem is that grant data is scattered across millions of individual tax filings, buried in schedules that weren’t designed to be searchable. Until recently, making sense of it required either an expensive subscription service or a lot of manual PDF reading.

Here’s how to find grant data effectively, and what to do with it once you have it.

Where grant data comes from

Grant information appears in two places on IRS filings:

Schedule I of Form 990. When a public charity awards $5,000 or more in grants to domestic organizations or individuals, they report the recipients, amounts, and purposes on Schedule I. Think of large community foundations, United Way chapters, and other grantmaking public charities.

Part XV of Form 990-PF. Private foundations report all grants paid or approved on their 990-PF. This is the richer dataset because private foundations are primarily in the business of making grants. Every grant from every private foundation in the country ends up here.

Between these two sources, the IRS has a remarkably complete picture of philanthropic grantmaking in the United States. The challenge is just accessing it.

How to search for grant data

Using 501(see)

501(see) extracts grant data from 990 and 990-PF filings and makes it searchable. You can:

• Search grants by funder or recipient name. Find all grants from a specific foundation, or all grants received by a specific organization
• Filter by amount. Looking for foundations that make six-figure grants? Filter by minimum grant size
• See the full picture. When you pull up an organization’s profile, you’ll see grants awarded, grants received, total amounts, and the individual line items from their filings

This is the fastest way to answer questions like “Which foundations have funded organizations similar to ours?” or “How much grant funding has this organization received, and from whom?”

Using ProPublica

ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer lets you search organizations and view their full 990 filings, but it doesn’t extract grant-level data into a searchable format. You can find a specific foundation’s filing and read through Schedule I or Part XV manually, but you can’t search across all grants.

Good for targeted research on a specific funder you already know about. Not practical for discovery.

Reading 990-PFs directly

If you want to go to the source, you can download 990-PF filings from the IRS or ProPublica and read Part XV. For a single foundation this is manageable. For any kind of systematic research, it’s a slog.

Practical grant research strategies

Finding funders for your nonprofit

Start with organizations similar to yours: same mission area, similar budget size, same geography. Look at who’s funding them. Those same foundations are likely prospects for you.

On 501(see), you can search for peer organizations and view their “grants received” data. Make a list of the foundations that appear repeatedly. Those are your warmest prospects, since they’ve already demonstrated interest in your cause area.

Sizing up a foundation before applying

Before investing hours in a grant application, check the foundation’s giving patterns:

• How much do they typically give? If their average grant is $5,000 and you need $100,000, it’s probably not a match.
• Who else have they funded? If every recipient is a hospital and you’re an after-school program, you’re likely outside their focus.
• Are they growing or shrinking? Compare grant totals across filing years. A foundation that gave $2M last year and $500K this year might be winding down.

All of this information is available in their 990-PF filings.

Tracking grants over time

Grant relationships aren’t one-time events. Many foundations fund the same organizations year after year. If you can see multi-year grant data, you can identify:

• Reliable funders: Foundations that consistently support your cause area
• New entrants: Foundations that recently started funding in your space
• Declining funders: Foundations that are pulling back (worth knowing before you apply)

Competitive intelligence

This isn’t just for grant writers. If you work at a nonprofit and want to understand your competitive landscape, grant data tells you who else is getting funded in your space, by whom, and how much. It’s the nonprofit equivalent of market intelligence.

What grant data won’t tell you

A few important caveats:

Timing. 990 filings are typically 1-2 years behind. A grant that appears in a 2024 filing might have been paid in 2023. If you need real-time grant announcements, you’ll need to supplement with foundation websites and press releases.

Context. The 990 tells you who gave how much to whom. It doesn’t tell you why, what the application process was like, or whether the funder is accepting new applications. Always check the foundation’s website before applying.

Small grants. Organizations only need to itemize grants of $5,000 or more on Schedule I. Smaller grants may be lumped into aggregate totals. 990-PFs are more comprehensive, but there are still gaps.

Non-cash grants. In-kind contributions, loaned staff, and other non-cash support don’t always appear in the grant schedules. The 990 captures cash grants reliably, but the full picture of a funding relationship may be more complex.

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The bottom line

Grant data is one of the most valuable and underutilized datasets in the nonprofit sector. It’s all public record, filed with the IRS every year by every foundation and major grantmaking charity in the country. The barrier has never been access; it’s been usability.

Tools like 501(see) are changing that by extracting grant data from filings and making it searchable, filterable, and actually useful for the people who need it most.

Search nonprofit grant data on 501(see), free, no credit card required.