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Researching a foundation's grantmaking activity is an important step in qualifying a potential funder as a prospect for your organization. It's helpful to know what kinds of nonprofits a foundation gives to, the sizes of grants made, and what the grants were for, so you can understand if a foundation is a good fit for your organization's mission and needs.

Cause IQ's organization profile pages and foundation search enable you to conduct in-depth research on a specific foundation's grantmaking history, with downloadable lists and reports available to share important details about a funder with your team.

After searching for a specific grantmaking organization in Cause IQ and opening up their profile page, scroll down to where you see several tabs along the lefthand side and click the "Grantmaking" tab.

The top of this section displays a grantmaking summary for the most recent year. You'll find amounts and details for the foundation's:

• Number of grants
• Average grant size
• Geographic focus
• Smallest grant size
• Median grant size
• Largest grant size

You'll also see a "Characteristics of grant recipients, most recent year" section that helps you understand the trends among grant recipients. You can see what types of nonprofits a foundation makes the most/least grants to, the different issues areas the foundation supports, and the geographic distribution of the foundation's grant recipients. Looking at a foundation's overall grantmaking behavior this way can give you an idea of whether or not your nonprofit is a good fit for a specific funder.

Here's a look at the "Grantmaking activity overview, most recent" and "Characteristics of grant recipients, most recent year" sections:

The bottom section of a funder's grantmaking page is where you can see a list of grants made.  For the grants listed, you'll see the grantee's name, EIN, grant description, grant amount, and a "Details" link. You can also filter the grants displayed in the list by certain grant characteristics.

You can filter the grant list by:

• Grantee type
• Grantee issue
• Grantee characteristics
• Grantee state
• Grantee metro
• Grantee NTEE code
• Organization name
• Grant description

For example, if you work for a human service organization in New York City, you can add a Grantee type filter with a "Human service organization" selection, and a Grantee metro filter with a "New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY" selection, to see a list of the human service organizations in the New York City metro area that the foundation gives to and the grant amount. This helps you understand a foundation's grantmaking activity towards nonprofits similar to your own.

Here's a look at this "Listing of grants made" section:

In the grantee list, at the bottom of the "Grantmaking" section of an organization's profile, you'll see a blue "Details" link on the right side. You can click this link to view details on the grant recipient and their grant history with the foundation. A popup will display the most recent grant and any other past grants identified by Cause IQ. Cause IQ provides the "Tax period", "Description", and "Amount" for the identified grants so you can get an understanding of how long the foundation has provided funding to the grantee.

Here's an example showing where you'll find the "Details" link, along with what you can expect to see after clicking this link:

There are a couple of ways to download grant details from Cause IQ, allowing you to to share information about potential funders with your colleagues. First, our detailed Excel reports include grantmaking and other organization data, and can be accessed directly from a foundation's profile page (included with all paid subscriptions). Second, the foundation search tool allows Pro subscribers to download lists of up to 3,000 grants at a time, including details on grant recipients, amounts, dates, and descriptions.

Downloadable detailed Excel organization reports

Every organization in Cause IQ includes a detailed Excel report that can be downloaded directly from their profile page. This report includes all of the information we have on a specific nonprofit, including grantmaking information, five years of financials, personnel data, vendor data, and more.

You can access the detailed Excel report for any organization in Cause IQ by clicking the "Download" button at the top of the profile page. Here's a screenshot that shows where you can locate this report:

When you click the "Detailed Excel report" link, the report will download as an Excel document on your computer. Opening up the document with Excel, you'll find the report organized by tabs (corresponding to different types of information) along the bottom of the spreadsheet. Click the "Grantmaking" tab to view the organization's grantmaking activity in Excel format.

Here's a look at the Grantmaking tab on a foundation's detailed Excel report:

Downloadable grant lists in Cause IQ's foundation search (Pro subscribers only)

The foundation search enables you to download lists of up to 3,000 grants at a time made by a specific foundation. First, open the foundation search from your dashboard or by clicking the "New search" button at the top of Cause IQ's organization search and selecting "Foundation search" from the dropdown list.

Next, isolate the foundation you're looking for with the Foundation EIN filter. To access this filter, click the blue "See all filters" button at the top of the page to open the Advanced search. Use the search box in the upper-left to find the filter by name ("Foundation EIN"), or select it from the full list of filters below. Enter the EIN for the foundation you're looking for into the text box in the center, then click "Add filter". Note that you can add multiple EINs into the text box (separated by commas or spaces) to download grant information for several foundations at once.

With your chosen foundation(s) now displaying in the Foundations tab, you can click the "Grants" tab to view the grants we've identified them making over the last few years. The Grants tab contains the following columns of information:

• Amount
• Grantmaker
• Recipient
• Fiscal year
• Description

Here's what the Grants tab looks like when researching a specific foundation (you can see the EIN filter for one specific foundation added above the search results):

If needed, you can filter the list of grants to be downloaded by adding filters for grant purpose, grant size, or when the grants were made. For example, you may only want to download grants made by a specific foundation during 2021 or grants that were designated as "unrestricted".

To filter a foundation's grants based on specific grant criteria, use the Grant amounts filter at the top of the foundation search to set a minimum, maximum, or grant amount range. You can also click the blue "See all filters" button and use the Advanced search to add the following additional grant filters:

• Grant purpose
• Most recent grants only
• Fiscal year when grants made

The screenshot below shows what the Advanced search looks like with a Most recent grants only filter selected on the left, and a "Yes" value selected in the center. Be sure to click "Add filter" to update your results.

To download your grant results, click the "Download" tab and select the "Listing of grants made" option in Step 1.

In Step 2, you'll see the following list of preselected columns the download will contain:

• Grantmaker EIN
• Grantmaker name
• Recipient EIN
• Recipient name
• Amount
• Fiscal year
• Description

Step 3 is a confirm step that tells you how many grant records your report will contain. Note that Listing of grants made and Foundations downloads are limited to 3,000 records per download, while personnel downloads (Key staff or board members at foundations) are available when viewing fewer than 1,000 foundation results.

When ready to proceed, click "Start download" and the Excel file will save to your computer.

Below is an example spreadsheet showing a downloaded list of grants from the foundation search: