How to Vet a Foundation in 20 Minutes

Development professionals often spend too much time on the wrong funders.

A thorough proposal can take forty hours to write. Relationship cultivation over years can require dozens of touchpoints. Before you invest that time, you should know whether a foundation is actually a fit. A focused 20-minute research sprint, done before any outreach or writing, will tell you most of what you need to know.

Here is the workflow.

Minutes 0-5: Start with the 990

Every private foundation in the United States is required to file a Form 990-PF annually with the IRS. This document is publicly available and it is the most reliable source of data on a foundation's giving.

Find the foundation's 990-PF on ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer or Foundation Search (both free). Look at the most recent two to three years.

What you are looking for:

Total assets. This tells you the foundation's scale. A foundation with $5 million in assets gives very differently than one with $500 million.

Total grants paid. Compare to total assets to understand the payout rate. Foundations are required to pay out roughly 5% of assets annually; those that pay out significantly more or less have a reason.

Largest grants. The top 20 grants by dollar amount reveal the foundation's real priorities, which may differ from its stated priorities on its website.

Smallest grants. If the smallest grant in the portfolio is $250,000 and your organization is seeking $25,000, you may be misaligned on scale.

Minutes 5-10: Read the Grant List

Scan all individual grants listed on Part XV of the 990-PF. This is where you find the actual organizations they fund.

Look for:

Organizations similar to yours. If your peer institutions are receiving grants, that is a positive signal.

Geographic patterns. Many foundations have unstated geographic concentrations. If 90% of grants go to organizations in New York and you are based in Tulsa, that is worth knowing.

Repeated grantees. A grantee that appears in three consecutive years is likely a core relationship. New names appearing year over year signals that the foundation is open to new relationships.

Program areas. Cross-reference the grant recipients' program descriptions with your own. If the population they serve and the work they do maps well onto yours, that is alignment.

Minutes 10-15: Visit the Foundation's Website

Now go to the foundation's website, but with a specific purpose: verify or challenge what the 990 told you.

Look for:

An application portal. If there is no application process listed and no contact information for program officers, the foundation likely only funds by invitation. That is not a reason to stop, but it is a reason to shift your strategy from applying to relationship-building.

Stated priorities for the current year. Foundations sometimes announce annual priorities or funding cycles. If they have published current priorities, map them explicitly against your work.

Recent news or grants announcements. Press releases about new grants reveal which organizations they are excited about right now. Read the descriptions of those organizations carefully.

Staff names and email addresses. Program officers are the humans who read your application and advocate for your proposal. Knowing who they are lets you do better research on their background and interests.

Minutes 15-20: Synthesize and Score

In the final five minutes, answer four questions:

1. Have they funded organizations similar to ours?
2. Are we in their geographic scope?
3. Is our funding need aligned with their typical grant size?
4. Is there a clear application pathway, or does this require relationship first?

If you answered yes to the first three, this funder belongs on your active pipeline. If you answered no to any of them, categorize the foundation as a future watch or research further before investing proposal time.

If the answer is unclear on multiple questions, that is a signal that the foundation does not publish enough information to make a clear determination. That sometimes means they are selective and private by design. It more often means they are a poor fit for cold applications and require an introduction.

Keeping a Record

The most expensive mistake in development is doing this research once, losing it, and having to repeat it. Keep a simple research log for every foundation you vet. It does not need to be elaborate: the foundation name, your score on the four questions, the date of your review, and a note about what you found.

When your team revisits a funder six months later, that log saves two hours of repeat work.

Building This Into Your Process

The 20-minute framework works best when it is a standing step in your pipeline management, not something you do once before a deadline sprint.

Block 20 minutes per new funder each month. By the end of the year, you will have a vetted prospect list of meaningful size, and your team will spend proposal-writing time only on funders you have already confirmed are a legitimate fit.

If you want funder research that is already done for you, Funding Findr provides 990-based funder profiles with grant history, giving trends, and fit signals built in. Development professionals at nonprofits use it to cut their research time on every funder they evaluate. Learn more at fundingfindr.co/for-nonprofits.

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