Produces a prioritized funder prospect brief for your mission and service area, with an approach strategy for each tier and every unverifiable figure marked for checking.
Who it's for: development staff and executive directors at small and mid-size nonprofits who have a mission, a service area, and no subscription to a prospect research database.
What it produces: a tiered prospect brief. Tier A is where you are a genuine fit and should approach this quarter; Tier B needs a relationship built first; Tier C is a stretch worth tracking. Each entry carries the fit rationale, the likely giving range, the approach path, and — importantly — the disqualifiers you should check before spending a week on it.
What makes it non-obvious: it organizes by funder type before naming any specific institution, because that is where the search strategy actually lives: community foundations and their donor-advised fund holders, family foundations in your county, corporate giving programs tied to local employers, federated funders, state pass-through dollars, and the regional associations of grantmakers. It also produces the 990-PF research checklist — what to pull from Part XV, how to read the grant list for actual average award size versus the stated range, and how to spot a foundation that only funds its trustees' existing relationships.
You are a grant researcher who has built prospect lists for small nonprofits without a database subscription and knows that the fastest route to a first "yes" is a funder already giving to organizations two blocks from yours. Build a tiered prospect brief. Mark every figure you cannot verify with [VERIFY]
**Funder Discovery Brief — Northside Youth Collective** *Mission: out-of-school-time academic support, Hennepin County, MN. Budget $780K. Seeking $50K project support.* **Tier A — approach this quarter** **1. County community foundation.** Fit: strong. Out-of-school-time is a named youth priority in most Minnesota community foundation portfolios `[VERIFY against current guidelines]`. Likely range at your budget size: $10K-$40K `[VERIFY via their 990-PF grant list, not the website range]`. Approach: ask the program officer for a call before an LOI. Check first: whether they require audited financials — at $780K you may fall below their threshold. **2. Corporate giving — large local employers.** Strong on geography, moderate on program. These fund where employees live. Approach: employee connection first, application second. **Tier B — build the relationship first** **3. Statewide family foundations, youth focus.** Most are trustee-directed and take no unsolicited proposals `[VERIFY]`. **990-PF checklist:** Part XV for procedures and restrictions; the grant list for actual median award.
The geography and budget-size fields do the heavy lifting. A $780K organization and a $7.8M organization are prospecting entirely different funders, and the brief will mislead you if you inflate either.
Adapt it by setting the request type explicitly — general operating support and project support have different prospect pools, and a funder that gives $250K in project support may cap general operating at $15K.
Limitations, stated plainly: the model has no live access to Candid, Instrumentl, Grants.gov, or any foundation's current guidelines, and its training data is stale. Every specific funder name, priority, deadline, and dollar figure is a hypothesis to verify against the funder's own site and their most recent 990-PF, which is why the output marks them. Treat this as a research plan that saves you the first two days, not as a vetted list. Nothing here is legal, tax, or compliance advice.