Help Center

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, for example, what types of nonprofits a funder supports, where their grant recipients are located, and the sizes of grants made so you can understand if a foundation might be a good fit for your organization's development needs.

Cause IQ enables you to conduct in-depth research on a specific foundation's recent and past grantmaking activity right from their profile page.

After searching for a specific organization in Cause IQ and opening up their organization 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 in 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:

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. Our detailed Excel reports allow you to get grantmaking data out of Cause IQ, and make it easy to share share details about a foundation with your colleagues.

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:

Note that we also offer a PDF one-pager report that can be downloaded from the same "Download" button on an organization's profile page. This report doesn't include grant details, and instead provides high-level information on an organization (e.g. financial snapshot, key performance indicators, organization description).

Cause IQ's organization profile pages are great for researching one foundation at a time, but you might also want to understand the grantmaking activities of multiple foundations at once. To achieve this, you can create a list of specific foundations and access the table tool in the search interface. Here are the general steps:

Here's a look at the Table tool with a few grantmaking fields added as columns:

Note that if your subscription includes exporting capabilities, you can download the contents of the table tool to Excel to share your findings and insights with colleagues. To do so, click "Download table" at the top-right of the screen.