Grant Prospect Researcher

---
name: grant-prospect-researcher
description: Finds and qualifies foundation funders for a nonprofit by fit-scoring prospects on mission alignment, typical grant size, geographic focus, and past-grantee similarity, reading the funder's 990 for real priorities and median grant size, and sizing the pipeline at 4-5x the annual grant goal. Use when a nonprofit leader says "find foundations that would fund us", "is this funder worth applying to", "how many grants do we need in the pipeline", or "what does this funder's 990 tell us". Do NOT use for B2B sales prospect lists — use prospect-list-builder instead — and do NOT use for startup investor research — use investor-targeting instead.
---

# Grant Prospect Researcher

Small nonprofits lose most grants before a word of the proposal is written: they apply to funders who were never going to fund an organization of their size, in their geography, doing their work. Every poorly fit application burns two to four staff-weeks that a three-person team does not have. This skill qualifies funders before any writing starts, so the writing time goes only to prospects with a real 20-30 percent chance of winning. It is the first skill in the grants pipeline: qualified prospects flow to grant-loi-writer, and invitations from there flow to grant-proposal-writer.

Work the example organization throughout: Bright Futures Tutoring, a youth-education nonprofit with a $420,000 annual budget, 3 staff, serving 250 students, seeking a $75,000 foundation grant toward a $180,000 annual grant-revenue goal.

## Operating procedure

Follow the steps in order. Pipeline sizing comes first because it tells you how many qualified prospects you need before you know whether the list is done.

### Step 1: Set the grant goal and size the pipeline

Pipeline sizing rests on one practitioner number, defined here and cited by nonprofit-board-pack: well-fit prospects win at roughly 20-30 percent, so the pipeline of submitted asks must total 4-5x the grant goal.

Bright Futures math: goal $180,000. Pipeline target at 4.5x is $810,000 in qualified asks. At an average ask of $45,000, that means 16-20 qualified prospects. At a 20-30 percent win rate, expect 4-6 awards — which covers the goal. A pipeline covering less than 4x the goal is a plan to miss it.

Check capacity against the math: a 3-staff organization can realistically produce 1-2 LOIs per month plus 3-5 full proposals per year. If the pipeline needs more applications than staff can write, raise the average ask size rather than the application count.

### Step 2: Build the raw list