Tracking Foundation Application Deadline Opportunities

As a non-profit, you know the challenges around keeping up to date on new and upcoming foundation funding opportunities and their deadlines. Although your first instinct may be to check a foundation’s website for deadlines, our research shows that fewer than one in ten US foundations provides this information on their site—or has a website at all.

A handful of deadline alerts services are available for non-profit researchers. Why so few? Because the main challenge you face is the same one these alerts services face: staying ahead of ever-changing deadlines. We’ll outline a few of these available services, and review some of their features and strategies for keeping informed of relevant opportunities.

Philanthropy News Digest, or PND, is a free US based service published by Foundation Center, and includes notices of awards and RFPs. Sent out biweekly as an email you can subscribe to, PND provides predominantly US opportunities, and those opportunities are grouped by category of giving. In conjunction with their email alerts, PND also provides an online search tool that allows you to search through their database of currently active RFPs; you can search by category of giving, state, or keyword. PND provides approximately 500 opportunity alerts per year, or about one alert for every thousand grants made.

FoundationSearch provides several comparable features related to keeping current with RFP deadlines and awarded grants. The Grants in the News Alerts can be emailed directly to your inbox and will also appear in your online Activity Box within the FoundationSearch product. You can customize the alerts you are sent, by selecting the granting state(s), receiving state(s), and category that you are interested in. You can also easily search the database of past Grants in the News alerts, using giving category, granting state, receiving state, or date range. FoundationSearch also provides Foundation Deadline Search, a search utility that lets you search for applicable deadlines from any of the active foundations included in the FoundationSearch database. You can easily search by deadline month, fiscal year end, foundation name, giving interests, city, or state, and can display the results sorted by either deadline date, foundation name, city, or state. A subscription is required to access this feature as well as the Grants in the News Alerts. As part of their subscription, members can also receive detailed RFP deadlines reports, customized by state and category. In the past three years, FoundationSearch has tracked more than 10,000 distinct funding opportunities from US foundations.

Beyond these tools, a quick search on Google for “foundation deadline opportunities alerts” will reveal a couple of free online grant deadline search services, most of which are specifically related to education (for example, GrantsAlert.com). Great if you’re a school or educator, but not so great if you’re looking for any other type of grant. Most other hits are postings from foundation websites announcing their own program application deadlines, which may or may not be applicable to your particular organization. Some larger foundations will provide email updates on upcoming deadlines if you request it, or provide RSS feeds that you can monitor. Ultimately the onus is on you as the researcher to find and request information on deadlines from these sources.

In brief, comprehensive deadline listings are few and far between. The larger services provide alerts and search capabilities, but even these provide only a limited sampling of all the possible granting opportunities available each year in the US.

While the challenge of keeping up to date with new and upcoming deadlines may be made somewhat simpler with alerts services, perhaps a better strategy for keeping abreast of the opportunities for your organization is to first identify the best funders for your organization, and then determine the application deadlines for each.

More on this in a future blog installment….

(Please feel free to leave a comment, or link/re-post as you like. I look forward to your comments, and opening up the conversation on foundation fundraising!)