Inside Philanthropy's Find a Grant Tool helps subscribers search over 4,000+ funder profiles by foundation name, keyword, and state in 100 Grant Finder categories. Note that IP only writes about funders that make over $150,000 in grants a year or more. We are always adding new funders and continually editing previous funder profiles. All funder profiles are updated annually, if not every six months, depending on the funder’s size, while localized state funder profiles are reviewed every year to year and a half.

Keyword Search

Example: If you're looking for grants related to women and girls, start with broader keywords such as “women,” which produces far more results than “women’s economic empowerment,” which garners a handful of results. 

Example: The full term “climate change” appears far less than the simple term “climate.”

  • For guidance on how to search funder profiles, please read more details below on punctuation tips.

  • If searching for funder profiles, use IP’s Find a Grant Tool, which locates grant opportunities for nonprofits.

  • If searching for archived IP Articles, use our internal search, found here.

Punctuation Tips

  • To improve your Find a Grant search, avoid using punctuation such as dashes, ampersands, commas, etc. 

Example: If you're interested in the “Howard G. Buffett Foundation,” it may be entered as “Howard G Buffett Foundation” or even simply “Buffett.”

  • Leave out the term “The” when searching for specific foundation information. 

Example: If looking for information about the Gates Foundation, enter “Gates Foundation” in the search box.  

  • Simply inputting the main word in a foundation’s name will provide the most success, such as “Gates” rather than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

How to search for local funders in specific focus areas

There are two ways to conduct a more localized search in a dedicated category:

  • Use the Search Grantfinder page to populate results for local grants by inputting two terms. Insert the first term in Keyword #1 (focus area) and then a second term in the State field. 

  • Scroll down on the main GF Find a Grant page, below Major Donors, to the State Funder Guides at the bottom of the page, listed by state or major city.

How to search for national and global funders in specific focus areas

There are two ways to locate funding from larger organizations: 

What do IP Take sections offer funder profiles?

IP Take sections, listed at the top of every Find a Grant funder profile, set our guides apart from all of our competitors. IP Take sections are designed to pull back the curtain on a foundation’s giving by reading into their funding habits and history – going far beyond 990s, RFPs, grant guidelines, and available information on a funder’s web presence, if one exists. Instead, our IP Take is meant to build-out insights that can help grant seekers not only cut the time it takes to write a grant, but position their proposal so that it is more likely to be chosen in a very competitive space. IP Takes also help subscribers understand if they’re a good fit, saving them untold hours of communicating back and forth with foundation staff.