The Best (Free) Places to Search for Grant Funding
May 17, 2018
Last updated September 2023
Knowing where to look for new grant opportunities is of central importance if your organization depends on grant money to survive. If your budget is large enough, you can subscribe to services that will send you alerts about new opportunities. If you are a small nonprofit or your budget is tight, a subscription service may not be feasible.
Fortunately, there are many free resources you can use to find open opportunities, some of which will even send you alerts. Below is a selection of resources you can use to learn about funders and open grant opportunities. While Google is often used for grant research, grant research using Google can be hit or miss (often many hits, many misses), so it has not been included as a resource.
If you know of other free resources for grant research, please share your knowledge by submitting a comment below.
FOUNDATIONS
To find foundation funding, you can do several things. If you have the name of a foundation, and the foundation maintains a website, you can visit the website to learn about the foundation’s programs and application guidelines. If you do not have a specific foundation in mind, one or all of the resources below can help you generate a list of potential leads:
Foundation Center: Through 400 public locations in the US and internationally, you can access the Foundation Center’s funder database, Foundation Directory Online (FDO), and other materials for free. To see if there is a Funding Information Network location near you, type your location into the Foundation Center’s lookup form. FDO offers several premium plans, which you can subscribe to on a monthly or annual basis.
Guidestar: Guidestar and the Foundation Center recently merged to form Candid. Although they’ve merged, they are currently still maintaining two separate websites. One of the free resources you’ll find on both sites is a database of form 990s. The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) form 990s and PF 990s are filed annually with the IRS by US-based nonprofits and foundations, respectively. An organization’s 990 can provide lots of useful information. If you are looking at the 990 of a nonprofit organization, the form will include a list of their funders from the fiscal year in question. If you are looking at a foundation’s PF 990, you’ll see the names of the organizations that the foundation funded during the filing period, the dollar amount given to each organization, and sometimes even a brief description of the purpose of each grant. Information about a foundation’s past giving history can help you find out if they fund organizations like yours, which can speed up the process of creating your target funder list.
GrantStation: GrantStation is a funder database. The company produces two free newsletters, one that lists recent US-based grant opportunities (weekly) and one that lists international grant opportunities (monthly). Although GrantStation is a subscription service, you can access the database for free through other services. For example, if you have a subscription to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, as part of your subscription, you also receive free access to the GrantStation. The Chronicle of Philanthropy is just one partnership GrantStation has in place. You can also access GrantStation for free if you are a member of the Grant Professionals Association. Through a partnership with GrantStation, Peak Proposals is also able to offer our readers an amazing discount on an annual subscription ($95/year instead of the regular price of $699/year). To access this special discount, please register for a free Peak Proposals member account. Once you log into the member area, click on “discounts” to learn more about the GrantStation offer.
FundsforNGOs: FundsforNGOs offers both free and paid content. On the FundsforNGOs website, you can find information about recently released opportunities, organized by category. FundsforNGOs also distributes a free newsletter of newly released calls for proposals. If you purchase a subscription to FundsforNGOs ($49/year), in addition to access to their funder database, you will also receive free access to webinars and other training materials.
Grant Gopher: Grant Gopher is a funding opportunity database that offers US-based organizations free basic searches and access to the details of their first five search results. With your free registration, you'll receive a newsletter that includes a selection of open grant opportunities. In addition, you’ll have the option to download up to five sample grant proposals under each funding category. An annual subscription ($99/year) is required to access all opportunity listings.
Grantmakers.io: Grantmakers.io is perhaps the holy grail of free resources and represents a generous gift to nonprofits, particularly smaller organizations that cannot afford a grant database subscription and lack access to a database through a community center such as a public library. Grantmakers.io makes the machine-readable IRS 990 dataset usable for nonprofit professionals. The person behind the database is Chad Kruse, who originally created it for a friend. When he saw how useful it could be, he opened the database up to the public. Grantmakers.io is an example of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Using this database, which allows you to see 4.8 million grants contained in the public IRS 990-PF dataset, you can see the names of the organizations foundations are funding, what they are giving money for (e.g., general support), and grant amounts.
Philanthropy News Digest (PND): PND is a service of the Foundation Center. On the PND website, you’ll find request for proposals (RFPs) listed by category. You can sign up for the PND newsletter to have RFP announcements delivered to your inbox. The site also includes philanthropy news and job postings. The website materials, newsletters, and RFP announcements are all accessible free of charge.
scientifyRESEARCH: scientifyResearch is a research funding database that has several plans, including a freemium one. The database is open to everyone, irrespective of location, allowing researchers all over the world to access opportunities. Its features include coverage of all disciplines, search filters, and grant alerts. For organizations and those needing additional search features, scientifyRESEARCH offers several premium plans.
Terra Viva Grants Directory: Terra Viva is a resource for grant opportunities for projects in developing countries related to agriculture, energy, environment, and natural resources. On the Terra Viva website, you can access funder profiles and lists of recent grant opportunities for free. For the very affordable price of $12/year, you can receive email alerts about funding opportunities and access a searchable database of funding opportunities. NOTE: Terra Viva may need to discontinue its services as of May 2024 because of a lack of funding.
Community Foundations: Community foundations are a significant source of funding for US-based nonprofits. You can find a list of community foundations on the Council on Foundations website, organized by state. You can also find community foundation listings on the Peak Proposals website.
Corporate Foundations: Many companies, multinational and local, have grant programs or provide in-kind donations. If you have access to a funder database, such as one of the ones mentioned above or listed on the Peak Proposals general resources page, corporate philanthropy programs are usually included as part of the database. If you do not have access to a funder database, one of the best (and free) ways to uncover corporate giving programs is to visit the websites of companies based in, or serving, your local community. Except for some multinational corporations, most corporate giving programs restrict their giving to communities where the company has a physical presence. You can learn about company giving programs (also known as corporate social responsibility or CSR programs) in your area through reading your local paper, reviewing local and regional business journals, and by noting sponsorships of local events. For more information about corporate giving, check out our post “Beginner’s Guide to Corporate Philanthropy.”
GOVERNMENT SITES
US Government (USG)
The single best resource to learn about USG grant opportunities is www.grants.gov, which is a free service of the USG. On grants.gov you will find opportunities posted by 26 federal agencies and 12 independent federal agencies, executive branch offices, and commissions.
To discover new opportunities, you have several options. You can visit grants.gov and search by agency, you can subscribe to the grants.gov RSS feed, or you can download the mobile app recently released by grants.gov for IOS and Android.
If your organization is based outside the US, grants.gov is still relevant. Many federal agencies post grant opportunities that are open to organizations based outside of the US. To find out whether an opportunity is open to you, check the eligibility section of the opportunity listing.
Federal Agencies and Other USG Grant-Making Agencies and Offices that Post Opportunities on Grants.gov
Federal Agencies
Other USG Grant-Making Agencies and Offices
National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) Grants and Loans
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (WWICS) Fellowships and Grants
USG Contracts
This blog post is focused on resources for identifying grant opportunities. If your organization is interested and able to pursue federal contracts, Contract Opportunities is the place to go. After you create an account on this site, you can set up alerts to learn about new postings related to specific opportunities.
State Governments (US)
State government opportunities can be a little harder to track down. Some state-sponsored opportunities will appear in funder databases, just like federally sponsored opportunities. As many state-based opportunities are actually federally funded, you will find them posted on grants.gov. One of the most reliable routes to find state-level opportunities is to visit the website of the state-level department that oversees your program area. For example, if you work in domestic violence, you would visit the website of your state’s health and human services department to look for listings of funding opportunity announcements.
Government Resources Outside of the US
For government resources for projects based in countries other than the US, you can find grant opportunity listings through government-sponsored websites and the websites of regional and multinational organizations.
Few national governments maintain a resource like grants.gov, which posts all government agency grants in a single location. If your organization is based outside of the US and you seek a grant for a project based within your country, you should first visit the website of the government agency (local, regional, or national) that oversees or regulates the program area most closely related to your organization’s mission. Second, you should check the websites of the embassies or foreign aid offices located in your country, particularly if your organization is located in a developing country. Embassies and foreign aid offices will sometimes post funding opportunity announcements for local, community-based organizations. To find a list of the embassies located in your country, you can do a search on websites such as world embassy page.
International Aid
Federal aid agencies fund the majority of international development work conducted around the world. In the US, the lead agency for international aid is the US Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID's grant opportunities are posted on grants.gov, and its contract opportunities are posted on https://sam.gov/content/opportunities. For forecasted opportunities (contracts and grants), there’s a very helpful database called the USAID Business Forecast.
Other governments also have foreign aid agencies and departments that offer grants and contracts. Some agencies only fund nongovernmental organizations based in their home country, while others fund both domestic and foreign organizations to carry out international development and humanitarian projects. All the major national aid agencies have websites where they provide programmatic updates and list open opportunities.
You can find a partial list of foreign aid agencies on the Global Funders resource page of our website. A comprehensive list of foreign aid agencies can also be found on Wikipedia.
Another site you may want to bookmark is Bond, the UK network for organizations working in international development. While many opportunities are limited to UK-based organizations, others are open to organizations located in other countries.
Lastly, you can find some information about international development opportunities on the site Devex. While you won’t be able to see the full opportunity posting for free, you can often see just enough information to be able to track down the full listing on the relevant funder’s public-facing website.
REGIONAL AND GLOBAL BODIES
Regional bodies and multilateral organizations such as development banks and UN agencies can also be a source of funding and contract work, particularly for larger or more well-established organizations. The sites listed below all have searchable databases of new opportunities on their websites (note: some require registration before accessing the database, but registration is free).
Examples include:
Regional Organizations
Global Organizations
The UN includes affiliated programs, funds, and specialized agencies, all of which have their own operating budgets and many of which support grant and contract opportunities. To learn about new opportunities, visit the website of the UN agency that works in the area most closely related to your organization’s mission. Examples of UN agencies include the United Nations Development Fund, World Health Organization, and the World Bank. You can find a list of UN agencies on the UN website.
OTHER RESOURCES
In addition to the resources above, you can also track down potential funders and funding opportunities by subscribing to newsletters distributed by individual foundations and philanthropy news outlets. While some philanthropy news outlets require a paid subscription, like the Chronicle of Philanthropy, others, such as the Nonprofit Quarterly, allow access to the full text of at least some of their content without a subscription. Finally, to get the latest updates about specific funding opportunities, foundations, and government agencies of interest to you, you can set up a Google alert to receive an email when new content related to your topic shows up in a Google search.
Another free resource, especially relevant to organizations based in the UK, is Charity Excellence Framework (CEF). CEF offers a variety of resources, including a free funder database. Although primarily directed toward UK-based charities, some resources are applicable to nonprofits globally.
