Foundation Search

I thought most nonprofits would have a pipeline of grants they were ready to write. I’d come in and help them figure out an approach, think through how they’d execute it, develop some strong alignment with donor missions, and write some high-quality grants.

Fun fact: No.

Discussions typically start with “we do cool thing x, y, and z; can you help us find funding for our cool things?”

Which, cool things are awesome…but I can think of a lot of cool things that never attract funding.

So, I looked at a number of foundation search options. GrantStation? Expensive. Grantseeker.io? Expensive. Candid? Very expensive.

As it turns out, most of these databases are just a fancy UI around public (inscrutable, but yes, public) IRS Form 990s.

Cue these organizations yelling at me “but we provide AI writing tools, bespoke integration, and checklists!!!” Nah, everyone uses them for donor research.

So uh, instead of paying for this, I downloaded all the 2025 IRS Form 990s from the IRS website. Now these are just text documents that you can only read in Notepad. They aren’t searchable, they aren’t cleaned, etc. The IRS just dumps them out on their website.

100,000s of nonprofits. Millions of rows. BUT, I just need the foundations, not every nonprofit in the country. So I figure out the python code to sort them. 25,000! That’s manageable. However…

I know nothing. I think I can just upload all these to copilot and tell it to search them.

Nope, wrong. That doesn’t work. AI doesn’t search like google. It takes chunks and outputs a “plausible answer”. That won’t fly.

Build a csv file with all the data? Millions upon millions of rows. Computer crashes.

Create thousands of csv files with the data? Still not searchable. Oh, and it lost critical data because the text files aren’t regularly formatted.

So then I create a single csv file with only the fields that I selected from these text files, and this morning I loaded it into Postgres.

Success!

Now I can query every single grant made by a foundation that filed with the IRS in 2025.

Long story short, private foundations gave over 600,000 grants last year.

If you are one of the 62 private foundations that gave grants related to basket weaving last year, it’s in my database. Perhaps you’d like to fund more basket weaving work?

And if you have a nonprofit and would like to know which foundations fund organizations like yours, reach out. Have I got a database for you.