Where our information comes from
We get asked this a lot, and it's a fair question — you're going to make decisions based on what we show you. Here is every source we use, in plain language, and where it falls short.
The numbers on this page come straight from our own database, recounted every night — not typed in by hand.
The short version
Most of what's useful comes from funders themselves — the pages they publish about their programs, deadlines and staff. We read those regularly, because they change.
We also search the open web for what's being said about a funder elsewhere: news stories, announcements and reporting that never appear on their own site.
We add the public records that governments require funders to file. Those are reliable, but slow — they usually describe a year that ended a long time ago.
And when you ask us to research individual donors, we do the same kind of work on public records and published information about a person.
Where funder information comes from
What funders publish about themselves
This is our biggest and most useful source. We read funders' own websites — 2.8M+ pages across 39,000+ funders so far — because that's where the current information lives: which programs are open, who they fund, when applications close, and who works there. It's also where the 49,000+ opportunities open right now come from. None of that appears in a tax filing.
What's reported about funders elsewhere
A funder's own site won't tell you they just named a new president, quietly retired a program, or announced a partnership that signals where they're heading next. So we search the open web for recent coverage too — news stories, articles, press announcements and reporting from the philanthropy press — and keep what's relevant, with a link back to the original.
This is most of what makes a funder brief feel current rather than historical. It's also what goes stale fastest, which is why we re-check it instead of writing a profile once and leaving it.
The public records funders have to file
In the United States, a foundation files a return each year with the tax authorities called a Form 990. It's a public document that lists the grants they made, who sits on their board, and what they hold. We've read 1,943,000+ of them, which gives us 9.6M+ individual grants across 230,000+ funders.
Most countries have their own version, and we read those too: Canada's annual charity return, the UK's Charity Commission records, Australia's charity register, and the national registers used across Europe. That adds 1.0M+ grant records from outside the United States, covering funders based in 88 countries.
These records are trustworthy, but they are old by the time they become public — usually describing a year that ended 18 to 24 months ago. They will tell you who a funder supported. They will not tell you what that funder is doing now, or whether the person who championed your kind of work still has the job.
Government grant opportunities
Government funding is published separately from foundation money, and every agency does it its own way. This part of our coverage is United States only for now: the national grants portal plus 40 state and district sources. There is no single place these are listed, so we add them one at a time — which is why this grows steadily rather than arriving all at once. Government grant listings in other countries aren't covered yet.
The people who work at funders
Grants are decided by people, not buildings. We keep 1.6M+ staff and board records, and follow 335,000+ job openings posted by funders — when a foundation hires someone new for a program area, that is usually an early sign of where its attention is going.
Where individual donor information comes from
Researching a person works differently from researching an institution, so it gets its own explanation. When you share a list of people — usually an export from your donor database, or a list of contacts — we research each one and score how promising a prospect they are for your organization in particular.
What you give us, and what we do with it
A name is the minimum. Anything else you can include — employer, city, email, or your own giving history with that person — makes the result better, because the genuinely hard part isn't finding information. It's making sure we've found the right person, and not someone who happens to share their name.
Public records
Company filings made to securities regulators, including the stock sales that company insiders are required to disclose. Tax filings showing foundation and nonprofit board positions. County property assessment records. The federal aircraft registry. The published Giving Pledge list.
Information that is already public
Professional profiles, published news coverage, encyclopedic references, and giving that has already been reported publicly — donor honor rolls, annual report listings, recognition pages. If a gift was announced in public, it can show up here. If it wasn't, it can't.
Your own records
If you share your giving history with someone, that is usually the single strongest signal in the whole picture — and it stays yours. Nothing you upload becomes part of another organization's research.
What we don't use
We don't buy prepackaged wealth-screening dossiers, consumer data-broker profiles, credit information, or purchased donor lists. What we use is public records, publicly available sources, licensed data, and research services we pay to run those searches for us.
We also don't use political contribution records. Campaign-finance data is public, but federal rules restrict using it to raise charitable money, so we took it out entirely rather than work the edges of that.
How the score is built
Each person gets four separate scores rather than one number, because they answer genuinely different questions:
- Capacity — could this person make a significant gift?
- Alignment — does your mission connect to something they already care about?
- Giving history — do they actually give, and at what level?
- Relationship — how close are they to your organization right now?
Two things are worth knowing about how we weigh evidence. Verified facts set a floor the score can't drop below — a home they own, a disclosed stock sale, a foundation they control, a gift they actually made to you. Things we merely infer can raise a score, but never set that floor. And capacity on its own is not a prospect: someone wealthy with no connection to your work scores low on purpose, because a list sorted by wealth alone is just a list of strangers.
And if someone shouldn't be researched at all, mark them and we skip them entirely.
What we do with all of it
Collecting this is the easy part. The useful part is making it searchable the way you would actually ask — describe the work you do, and get back funders who fund that work, rather than funders whose website happens to use the same words.
- We read each funder's material and write a plain summary of what they genuinely fund and who they serve.
- We score how well each funder fits your organization in particular — where you work, your size, the kind of money you need. The same funder can be a strong match for you and a weak one for a similar group down the road.
- We go back and check the sources on a schedule, so programs and deadlines don't quietly go out of date.
Where our information falls short
A page about our sources that only listed the strengths wouldn't be worth much. So here is the other side.
- Some funders have far more detail than others. That follows the source, not the country — a funder we know only from a national register gets an honest but thinner profile, because the register itself says little. We would rather show you less than invent the rest.
- Public filings are always behind, and nobody can fix that. What we can do is be clear about which part of a funder's profile came from an old filing and which came from their website recently.
- We don't have everyone. Some funders have no website worth reading, many government sources aren't connected yet, and some foundations are private on purpose.
- Matching a person to a public record is the hardest thing we do. Names repeat, and a wrong match is worse than no match, so we leave a finding out when we can't confirm it is the same person. Some mistakes still get through, which is why every finding shows what it rests on.
- Some of it will be wrong. Web pages are messy and deadlines change. Everything in a funder profile points back to where it came from, so you can check it — and checking before you rely on it is a good habit.
Why we go to this trouble
Because a search box over old tax returns doesn't solve the real problem. Knowing that a foundation exists has never been what stops a small, community-rooted organization from getting funded. What stops them is not knowing what that funder cares about right now, who inside it makes the decision, and whether anyone they know can make an introduction.
Information makes a funder visible. It doesn't make them reachable. The second part is the whole point.