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See grants that a foundation makes

Conduct in-depth research on a foundation's grantmaking activity to understand the kinds of nonprofits they support

In this help article...

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.

Access a foundation's grantmaking details from their profile page

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:

Grantmaking tab & section overview

Grantmaking characteristics

See a listing of grants made

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:

Listing of grants made on profile

View specific grant details

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:

Grant details click

Grant details page

Download grant information into Excel spreadsheets

There are two 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. Second, the foundation search tool allows you to download lists of up to 2,500 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:

Download detailed Excel report - location

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:

Detailed Excel report - grantmaking tab screenshot


Downloadable grant lists in Cause IQ's foundation search

To view and download a list of up to 2,500 grants for a specific foundation, you will first need to open Cause IQ's foundation search. You can access 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 in the foundation search by adding an EIN filter. There are two ways to do this:

  1. Use the foundation search wizard that automatically appears when you first open the tool and select the last option, "I'm looking for a specific foundation". Search for the specific foundation by name, select it, and a corresponding EIN filter will be added to your search.
  2. Alternatively, you can add a Foundation name filter from the search filter sidebar, typing in the name of the foundation you're looking for. Note that you may get several results for foundations with similar names (for example, there are six separate organizations with "Kellogg Foundation" in their name). In this case, you'll need to scroll through the results to find the foundation you want, and then click the "Single out" link next to the name of that foundation. This will automatically add an EIN filter for the specific foundation you've chosen.

With your chosen foundation now isolated in the foundation search, click the "Grants" tab to view a list of grants made, or the "Grants recipients" tab to see the list of nonprofits the foundation supports.

The following columns of information are available in the Grants tab:

  • 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 in the upper-left of the screen):

Foundation search - EIN filter and grants tab

You can filter down further on the grants displayed based on their purpose, size, or when they were made. This may be useful if you're only interested in grants made during a certain timeframe, for example, or if the foundation has made more than 2,500 grants and you want to be able to download the grant list to Excel (see section on downloading lists below). To filter the grants displayed, click the "Filter grants" link and select from the following filter options:

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

Keep in mind that the Grants, Foundations, and Grant recipients tabs in the foundation search are interdependent; adding a filter to one tab will automatically update the results in the other two tabs accordingly. For example, if you add a Most recent grants only filter within the Grants tab, results in the Grant recipients tab will automatically update to only show nonprofits that received a grant in the most recent year.

Here's a look at the grant filters pop-up module. After selecting your additional filters, be sure to click the blue "Add filter" button to update your search:

Foundation search - grant filters pop-up


When you're ready to download the list of grants displayed, click the "Download" link in the upper-right of the screen. Note that each download is limited to 2,500 records, so you will need to add additional grant or grant recipient filters to narrow down your list if the results exceed this number.

The Excel spreadsheet will contain the following columns:

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

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

Foundation search - grant list download example

View grants made by multiple foundations at once

Cause IQ's foundation search allows you to view grants for one foundation at a time or multiple foundations simultaneously. To see grants for multiple foundations, add the EIN for each foundation into the same EIN filter (found in the search filter sidebar). Note that EINs must be separated by commas or spaces for this to work. Once added, you can then click the "Grants" tab to see a list of grants made by all of the foundations in your search, or the "Grant recipients" tab to see a list of all recipient organizations.

The screenshot below shows a foundation search containing five foundations. You can see that all five organization EINs are added to the same EIN filter in the upper-left of the screen (each one separated by a comma):

View grants for multiple foundations at once