Help Center

Looking at which foundations make grants to your peers (other organizations like yours) can be a great way to identify potential funders for your nonprofit. Cause IQ's foundation search allows you to do just that; in addition to seeing a list of foundations that make grants to organizations like yours, you can view a list of your peer organizations and the grants they received, with the ability download this information into Excel spreadsheets. Further in-depth research can be done on a peer organization's profile page to help you understand where their grants and other income comes from.

The first step is to open Cause IQ's foundation search. To do so, click the "New foundation search" button from your dashboard (you can also click the magnifying glass icon in the navigation bar on any Cause IQ webpage and select "New foundation search").

Here's what this button looks like on the Cause IQ dashboard:

Next, you need to add grant recipient filters to your search. This will enable you to narrow down on foundations that support nonprofits like yours (e.g., organizations of the same type, location, size). There are a couple of ways to do this; the first is to click the "Grant recipients" tab and click the "Filter recipients" link to select from the following filters:

• Location
• Types
• NTEE code, primary
• Total revenues
• Num. employees
• Detailed description
• Characteristics

The screenshot below shows the location of the Grant recipients tab and the "filter recipients" link:

The second way to add grant recipient filters is to use the help wizard that automatically appears when opening the foundation search. Select the first option, "I want to find foundations that fund nonprofits like mine" and a few commonly-used grant recipient filters display that you can easily add to your search.

The screenshot below shows the recipient field selector popup that displays when using the wizard:

Let's go through an example of creating a peer search using grant recipient filters. In this scenario, a Development Director at an animal shelter in Albany, New York wants to know which foundations support their peers (other animal shelters in the same region). Here are the grant recipient filters needed to identify this list of foundations:

• Types - Animal shelters
• Location - Metro: Albany-Schenectady-Troy

Here's a video that walks through the process of creating this peer search using the help wizard:

Once you've added grant recipient filters to your search, click the "Foundations" tab to see the list of foundations that support your peers, the "Grants" tab to see the grants they receive, and the "Grant recipients" tab to your peer recipients.

After creating your peer search, click the "Foundations" tab to view the list of funders that make grants to nonprofits like yours. To download this list, click the "Download" link in the upper-right of your screen. Note that searches with more than 2,500 foundation results will require you to add additional filters to download the list.

The downloaded Excel file contains the following columns:

• EIN
• Foundation name
• Street address
• City
• State
• Zip code
• Total revenue
• Total assets
• Grant geographic focus
• Number of grants made

Here's a look at the popup that displays after clicking the "Download" link:

Conducting in-depth research into the funding sources of a specific peer organization can be a great way to discover foundations that may not already be on your team's radar. The funding tab on an organization's profile page provides a detailed look at their funding sources, including grants, and gives you the complete picture of where a peer organization gets its money from.

To access the funding tab, first you'll need to open up the Cause IQ profile page for the organization. There are few ways to do this:

1. From the foundation search, click on an organization's name from the list of results in the Grant recipients tab.
2. Another option from the foundations search is to add a Recipient name filter from the search filter sidebar and select the organization from the Grant recipients tab.
3. From the dashboard, type the organization's name, EIN, or website URL into the smart search box found at the top of the page.

With the desired profile page open, scroll down to where you see several tabs along the lefthand side of the page and click "Funding".

This screenshot shows where to locate the funding tab at the bottom of an organization's profile page:

Here you can view the organization's funding sources, including grants and contributions, fundraising event income, program service revenues, and other investments. A "Grants from foundations and other nonprofits" section displays the total number of grants Cause IQ identifies the organization receiving, the total value of the identified grants, and a list of the specific grants they received.

The list of grants shows you the:

• Grantmaker
• Grantmaker tax period
• Description
• Amount

By default, Cause IQ displays the grants from largest to smallest (based on amount), and you can sort the grants accordingly by column header. You can also search for keywords in grant descriptions or specific grantmaker organizations by using the "Search grants..." search field.

Here's what the "Grants from foundations and other nonprofits" section looks like:

Note that individual funder names are linked, and you can click on them to open their organization profile page and do further research into their grantmaking.