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We know that finding funding to support your organization can be challenging. That's where Cause IQ can help! Cause IQ equips you with the tools and data you need to create searches for foundations based on foundation type, funding focus, location, characteristics of grants made, and other variables. Drilling down on the right potential funders allows you to conduct targeted outreach and maximize your chances of receiving a grant.

The first step is to open Cause IQ's foundation search. You can access the foundation search by clicking 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 dashboard:

Add foundation filters

Begin by adding foundation filters to your search in order to narrow down results based on what type of foundation you're looking for (e.g., private foundations, family foundations, corporate foundations), where they focus their funding, location, and other characteristics.

To do so, add Foundation types and Funding focus filters from the top of the foundation search. You can add other foundation-specific filters by clicking the "See all filters" button to launch the Advanced search and scrolling through the list. Additional foundation filters include:

• Grant geographic focus
• Total num. grants made
• Foundation location
• Foundation size
• Foundation assets
• Foundation revenues
• Foundation characteristics
• Foundation issues
• Foundation EIN
• Foundation name
• Form 990-PF accepts unsolicited proposals
• Foundation saved lists (your manually created lists of foundations)

The screenshot below shows where to access the Foundation types and Funding focus filters from the top of the foundation search, and the "See all filters" button to access additional foundation-specific filters:

Add grant and/or grant recipient filters

In addition to filtering on characteristics of the foundations themselves, you can narrow down your list of funders to those based in a specific location or that make grants of a certain size. The following grant recipient and grant filters can be added from the top of the foundation search:

• Grant recipient location
• Grant amounts

To access all available grant and grant recipient filters, click the "See all filters" button to open the Advanced search. Here, you can search for a filter by name or value (e.g., "grant recipient issues" or "children"), or scroll through the list of filters and select the one you want. Here's the full list of grant and grant recipient filters you'll find in the Advanced search:

• Grant purpose
• Most recent grants only
• Fiscal year when grants made
• Grant recipient description
• Grant recipient NTEE code, primary
• Grant recipient revenues
• Num. grant recipient employees
• Grant recipient types
• Grant recipient characteristics
• Grant recipient issues
• Grant recipient location
• Grant recipient EIN
• Grant recipient name

After selecting a filter from the left side of the Advanced search popup, corresponding filter values and match counts will display in the center section. Be sure to click the "Add filter" button to update your results.

The screenshot below shows where to search for and find additional filters in the Advanced search:

Note that the center section of the Advanced search is also where you can setup advanced queries to exclude foundations based on specific criteria. For example, while corporate foundations are a type of private foundation, you might want to remove them from your results. You can do this by adding a Foundation types - "Corporate foundations" filter in the Advanced search that is set to "Exclude all organizations with these values".

Here's what it looks like to exclude corporate foundations in the Advanced search:

Let's go through an example foundation search so you can see several kinds of filters in action. In this scenario, we'll create a search to identify family foundations in the San Francisco, CA metro area that focus their support on local arts and culture organizations, and that made unrestricted / general support grants of at least $10,000 in the most recently-filed tax year.

We'll start off creating this search using the four most commonly used foundation search filters located at the top of the page:

• Foundation types - "Family foundations"
• Funding focus - "Arts, cultural, and humanities"
• Grant recipient location - "Metro: San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA"
• Grant amounts - $10,000 and above

Then, we need to click the "See all filters" button to open the Advanced search and add a few additional filters:

• Foundation location - "Metro: San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley, CA"
• Most recent grants only - "Yes"
• Grant purpose - "unrestricted" OR " general support"

Here's a quick video that demonstrates how to create this foundation search:

Customers with a Pro Subscription can use the foundation search to download foundation, grant, and foundation personnel lists to Excel spreadsheets. After creating your search with various filters, click the "Download" tab and go through the steps to complete your report. The steps to download are:

Step 1: What to download — Select the kind of download you want to do. To pull the list of foundations from your search results, select the "Foundations" option.

Step 2: Additional details — Here you'll see the list of preselected the columns your report will contain, which vary depending on the type of download you're doing. For a foundations list download, these fields include:

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

Note that if you selected to do a "Key staff or board members at foundations" in step one, you'll need to select the specific kinds of personnel you want included in your report in step two. Personnel options include:

• Board Chair / President
• Executive Director / CEO
• Grants / Development
• Programs

Step 3: Confirm — This is where you'll proceed with the downloaad. Note that
foundation and grant list downloads are limited to 3,000 records at a time, and personnel downloads are available when viewing 1,000 or fewer foundations.

A notification will display in step three if the number of records in your search results exceeds the download limit. If this happens, you just need to add additional filtering criteria to narrow your search results further. An easy way to do this is to add grant amount bands using the Grant amounts filter, breaking up your results into smaller chunks (for example, first search grant amounts up to $10,000, then search $10,000 to $50,000, and so on).

Here's a screenshot of the Download tab that shows the steps and options included for a foundation personnel download: