Find your match!

You've signed up for an online dating site. How do you find your One True Love? First, you have to know what you need. Then you list what you have to offer. Finally, you look at the others on the site to decide who has what you need and wants what you offer.

Finding a good sponsor for your grant project happens just that way. Except for the dating site. Sort of.

There actually are "dating sites" for grant seekers, only they're called Grants.gov and FoundationCenter.org. There are others, but those are the main ones.

Grants.gov lists every currently open grant opportunity offered by the federal government. You can search it by keyword, agency, or other ways depending on what you're looking for.

Foundationcenter.org, which has a listing for every private non-profit fund-granting agency that filed taxes with the IRS in the previous year, has only a basic search function online. You have to have a subscription with them to get more user-friendly access. However, since they get their information free from the IRS (long story for another post), they are required to make their subscriber-level information free at several sites in each state. Check with public libraries and university libraries in larger towns/cities in your area to see if the Foundation Center database is available there. Most will have librarians on staff to walk you through the process.

Not sure how to figure out what you need or what you offer? Or how to decide what is an effective match? We'll talk about that as well in a later post!