How To Search For Grants Without Losing Hours of Your Life

There are a lot of nonprofit funding opportunities out there, but it takes time to find and apply for them. Not to mention—there’s not even a guaranteed return on investment!

The good news is that Instrumentl can help, curating grant opportunities that meet your exact funding needs to streamline the process.

Want to be like Tucker’s House and save hours on grant prospecting each week? Keep reading, and we’ll show you how.

Our time-saving strategies and tips will equip you to cut through the noise and focus on the best-fit funding opportunities, increasing your chances of grant success.

Instrumentl is an all-in-one grant research and management solution, meaning you can manage the entire end-to-end grant lifecycle in a single platform.

It’s a huge time saver that can completely transform your workflow, starting with how you search for grants. Here are some tips for saving time and streamlining your prospecting process:

Schedule Regular Sessions for Grant Searching

As a grants professional, it’s absolutely critical that you have a methodical process in place for searching for funding opportunities.

At a minimum, this should include setting up regular sessions in your schedule for grant searching.

Here’s what this could look like:

• Blocking one hour per week (or more, depending on your need) to dedicate to searching.
• Identifying who should be involved. Clearly define the roles of who is searching, who is consulting, and who is inform-only.
• Select areas of funding: What programs or focus areas are you looking to fund? If you have more than one, make sure to prioritize them so you can develop a funding strategy.
• Scheduling weekly or bi-weekly sessions to come together as a team, narrowing down opportunities. (Using Instrumentl, you can share opportunities with your team and save grants for later review—more on this later).
• Make a plan to execute the next steps. Do you need to obtain approval to pursue the grant? What next steps do you need to take?‍
• Define reporting expectations. Who will you be sharing your findings with? How?

Veronica Kulon, Grant Professional and Nonprofit Consultant with EmpowermentSolutions.org, shared insights on how she approaches grant searching:
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“Many organizations face constraints in terms of time and personnel for grant prospecting and application preparation. The solution is to prioritize efforts based on potential impact, use search filters aligned with your mission, and consider collaborating with team members or volunteers to distribute the workload efficiently.”

Clearly defined search parameters, along with protected time to search and discuss opportunities, will make sure you’re making the most of your time.

Create Personalized Searches Through Projects

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Carving out time each week to search for funding opportunities is only the first step. Now you have to figure out how to search through the thousands of available opportunities to narrow in on the best-fit opportunities for your nonprofit. Thankfully, Instrumentl can help here too!

Within the platform, you can create projects (which are essentially saved searches) to target grants based on:

• Funding area
• Type of grant
• Geographic location
• Award amount
• And more

Using these criteria, Instrumentl’s Smart Matching algorithm will curate a list of active grants that meet your qualifications for your review. Your projects are saved, and the next time you log in, you’ll be able to pick up where you left off.

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Finding grants online can be a tedious and manual process, so a grants database like Instrumentl can help you find best-fit funding faster.

Research Potential Funders

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Once you’ve identified potential funding opportunities, you also want to take time to research potential funders to see if their grant is worth pursuing. Just because you meet their eligibility requirements doesn’t mean you’d be a competitive applicant.

Before you invest a lot of time in applying, you can use Instrumentl’s 990 Snapshots to look at a funder’s:

• Top funding areas
• Geographic preferences
• Past grantees
• Average grant amounts
• Openness to new grantees

When you click on an opportunity from your list of matches, you can easily toggle over to the “Funder 990 Report” tab to view the latest insights with just the click of a button.

Even if you look like a good fit on paper, their giving history may tell a different story.

With Instrumentl, you don’t have to sort through complicated tax forms or spend hours combing through different spreadsheets of research—everything you need to know about a funder is available in a single intuitive interface.

When using a grants database, you might find that your search results in a couple hundred matches. Instead of taking the time to review them one by one, Instrumentl offers advanced sorting and filtering tools you can use to narrow down your matches to the best-fit opportunities.

Here are some tips for using these features to help you target your results.

Prioritize Grants by Funding and Urgency

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Within Instrumentl’s grant matches, you can use the sorting feature to organize your results by:

• Best Match: By default, your grants are sorted by 'Best Match'. This is Instrumentl's proprietary way of ranking your grants that bring opportunities toward the top of your list that have the most in common with your project criteria.
• Deadline: Sort your grants by 'Deadline' if you want to see opportunities with upcoming deadlines first. This gives you a good way to ensure you don't miss out on relevant opportunities with deadlines coming up in the near future.
• Amount: Sort your grants by 'Amount' if you want to see opportunities from funders who give larger amounts at the top of your list. Grants where amounts are 'unspecified' will be found at the bottom of your list when sorted by 'Amount'.
• New: Sort your grants by 'New' if you want to bring grants that have been added to your matches within the last week to the top of the list. Look for the orange 'new' tag to easily identify new grant matches.

These filters can help you focus on the most relevant opportunities first—saving you time and frustration.

Streamline Searches With Targeted Criteria

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Instrumentl also provides multiple filters you can use to narrow down your results to exactly what you’re looking for.

You can filter your list of matches by:

• Saved or hidden on other projects: By default, Instrumentl will show all matches for a project, even if that grant opportunity has previously appeared in your matches for a different project. De-selecting them will remove any grants that were previously saved or hidden across other projects.
• Funding use: Filter your grants by any of the funding uses you selected when you created your project.
• Field of Work: Filter by Field of Work to narrow down your matches based on the specific Fields of Work selected when setting up the project.
• Location of Project / Location of Residency: Hone in on grants that apply to your area. This will narrow down the results to only those that specifically call out the location at a county level, rather than a national or state level.
• Past Giving: Narrow down your results to those that have previously given to either your Location of Project or Location of Residency on the county level. This is an awesome way to prioritize funders who are more likely to give to your area. 
• Funder type: Use this filter to view only grants from a particular kind of funder.

Instrumentl’s rich database has many funding opportunities available, and using the right criteria to filter your results by can save you time by making sure you only see opportunities that are most relevant to your funding needs.

Leverage Keywords to Refine Searches

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When reviewing your grant matches within Instrumentl, you can take your search one step further by using keywords to refine your results.

This keyword search option allows you to search through the grant text in all your Matches. For instance, if you wanted to bring up any grants that specifically mention the word 'police', you could use the keyword search to do so.

‍Pro tip: You can use the keyword search for any kind of keyword, including locations. That said, keep in mind that a funder may still be a good fit even if they don't mention a specific keyword in their grant description.

The robust search capabilities alone are a complete game changer when it comes to Instrumentl. However, there’s much more to the platform that can help you maximize your most important resource: time.

Utilize Weekly Update Emails

Another cool time-saving feature with Instrumentl is you’ll actually get personalized emails from Instrumentl each week listing all the new grant opportunities that meet your project criteria.

If any are of interest, you can click on them to view more details, save them, or share them with members of your team.

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If you’re not receiving new opportunities, you may need to refine your search process.

• Do you need to broaden your geographic location? Sometimes, you may need to look outside your city or county for new opportunities.
• Are you only looking for a specific type of funding? Federal grants may only be available on a quarterly basis, while foundations and other funders may have less strict schedules.

The weekly emails bring new funding opportunities directly to you. Instrumentl does all of the heavy lifting, so you don’t have to spend time doing it.

Complete Task Management Within Instrumentl

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Instrumentl’s time-saving features extend beyond prospecting. Instrumentl also has robust task management features to help make grant management a breeze, saving you so much time and effort.

For example, you can create and assign tasks to team members within the platform. These tasks and their due dates will populate on the grants calendar view, and those responsible will receive reminders that they have a deadline coming up. There will never be any confusion or double work when you use this feature.

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Here’s a helpful video explaining how to manage all of your grant-related tasks within Instrumentl: How To Manage Your Grant To-Dos In Instrumentl.

Instrumentl is great for promoting collaboration within your team, helping clearly define responsibilities, deadlines, and so much more to save you time throughout the entire grant management process.

Pull Reports

Instrumentl has a lot of reporting capabilities, helping you easily export all of your saved grants to share your prospects with your Board of Directors or leadership to help with strategic planning.

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These reports include information on:

• Deadlines
• Award Status
• Amount
• Any upcoming tasks
• Notes you’ve shared on the opportunity

This is a great way to involve your C-suite and other leaders in the grant prospecting and management process, giving them a snapshot of what’s to come. They can weigh in and share any connections they may have to make the process easier.

Share Saved Opportunities

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You can also share saved opportunities with your colleagues via email, even if they are not on Instrumentl. It’s easy to do. All you need to do is locate the grant within your saved opportunities and enter in their email.

Once you email the grant to your colleague—even if they’re not on Instrumentl—they can still click on the opportunity to view it. This ensures you’re all on the same page and your team can weigh in on if the opportunity is worthwhile, which will save you time.

Upload Documents in a Central Repository

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It can take a lot of time to locate documentation if it is all over the place.

If you don’t have a clear organizational system or document repository, locating information can be challenging. With different versions floating around, it can be difficult to know what is actually the final document.

Not with Instrumentl—Instrumentl offers a document library where nonprofits can upload all their information within a single location. Additionally, you can even add a link to shared files external to Instrumentl to help keep your whole team organized.

This helps drive efficiencies in your workflow, allowing you to invest time in other more important areas.

Instrumentl can revolutionize your approach to grant prospecting. As you learn how to search for grants, keep the following tips in mind:

• Organize your grant search, scheduling time to search, creating projects in Instrumentl, and conducting strategic prospect research.
• Use advanced sorting and filtering capabilities to prioritize your grants, streamline searches, and refine results.
• Maximize your time, setting up weekly updates and task management processes.
• Enhance collaboration through reporting, sharing saved opportunities, and centralized documentation.

You can do this all and more within Instrumentl. To see how much it can help save your nonprofit time, sign up for a free, 14-day trial today!