Help Center

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, location, characteristics of grants made, what kinds of nonprofits they support, 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

You can 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 foundation, corporate foundation), where they're located, and other characteristics. There are a couple of ways to do this; the first is to add foundation filters from the search filter sidebar on the bottom-left of the page. The available foundation filters are:

• Types
• Characteristics
• Location
• Grant geographic focus
• Number of grants made
• Total revenues
• Total assets
• EIN
• My saved lists

Here's a screenshot showing where to find the foundation filters within the search filter sidebar:

The second way to add foundation filters is to use the help wizard that automatically appears when you first open the foundation search. Select the second option, "I'm looking for certain types of foundations", and a few commonly-used foundation filters display that you can easily add to your search.

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

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 that make grants for specific purposes or to support certain kinds of nonprofits. The Grants and Grant recipients tabs in the foundation search both offer additional filter options to further narrow down your list of foundations.

To add grant filters to your foundation search, click the "Grants" tab and then click the "Filter grants" link in the upper-right of the screen. A popup displays containing available filters to add to your search, which include:

• Description of grant purpose
• Amount of grant
• Most recent grants only
• Fiscal year when grants made

The screenshot below shows where to find the "Filter grants" link within the Grants tab:

Similarly, to add grant recipient filters, 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

Here's what this popup looks like after clicking the "Filter recipients" link in the Grant recipients tab:

Let's go through an example so you can see all three filter types used together to create a foundation search. In this scenario, we'll create a search to identify private foundations that made individual grants of at least $15,000 to museums in the Austin metro area. Here is a list of the filters needed to create this search, which notes which tab each filter comes from:

• Types - Private foundations (Foundations tab)
• Amount of grant - $15,000 minimum (Grants tab)
• Location - Austin metro area (Grant recipients tab)
• Types - Museums (Grant recipients tab)

Here's a video that walks through the process of creating this foundation search:

You can download ists of up to 2,500 foundation records right from the Foundations tab. After you've added foundation filters (and possibly grant and/or grant recipient filters as well) to narrow down on the funders you care about, click the "Download" link in the upper-right of your screen. 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

Note that searches with more than 2,500 foundation results will require you to add additional filters in order to download the list. One easy way to do this is to add revenue bands using the Total revenues filter, so you're looking at smaller chunks of organizations at a time (e.g., first search revenues between $1m to $5m, then search $5m to $10m, and so on).

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