Civly matches your programs against millions of paid grants in public IRS filings. Each match includes the funder’s giving history, whether it accepts applications, its restrictions, and the deadline where available.
IRS filings list grant recipients, amounts, and purposes. Private foundations also report whether they accept applications and any restrictions or deadlines. Civly uses these records to identify funders that fit your work.
You can see that application block for yourself, free. Our Open Foundations explorer publishes, state by state, the 8,971 private foundations that tell the IRS they accept unsolicited requests, with the deadline, the restrictions and the contact exactly as filed. Only 27,218 of the 131,545 foundations that answer the question say yes, and the explorer is the list. Grant Matching is what happens next: your programs matched against the grants those funders actually paid.
Every grant carries a purpose line the funder wrote — “community health worker training,” “emergency shelter operations,” “after-school literacy.” We match your programs against that text across millions of paid grants, not against a category dropdown that flattens your work into “Human Services.”
Recipient name, address, and EIN sit on the grant record. So we can see what a funder does rather than what it claims: whether it gives outside its own county, whether it writes $10,000 checks or $500,000 checks, and whether the organizations it backs look anything like yours.
A private foundation states on its own return whether it takes unsolicited requests, what it limits awards to by geography and field, who to address them to, and the deadline. Where a funder publishes guidelines instead, we read those. So a foundation that only pays a preselected circle is marked closed before you spend a week on it, and an open one arrives with its restrictions and its cutoff attached. Federal notices run alongside on a live feed, sorted by what closes first.
Every row carries the evidence that produced it: the grant, the year, the purpose the funder gave it, the filing it came from — and whether they will take a request from you, restricted to what, closing when.
Three passes: read your organization out of its own filings, find the funders whose money moves toward that work and will take a request from you, then name the people who decide.
As new filings arrive, Civly sends a brief with new matches, changes at funders you are tracking, and contacts to approach. Reply to request more detail on any funder.
Four funders newly match your programs, and one you were already tracking changed its giving. Two close inside the next eight weeks.
Changed: a funder on your list has not reported a grant in your program area for two consecutive filings. Worth a call before another proposal cycle.
Public filings first, at scale, and the funder’s own published guidelines where the filing runs out.
Where the record stops. The live feed covers federal notices. It is not a calendar of every open call in the country: foundation deadlines still arrive attached to the funders your match surfaces, because most are never posted anywhere — of 101,914 private foundations, 1,569 state a deadline at all. A 990 also describes a year that has already closed, so a deadline filed on last year’s return is that year’s cycle; where the cycle matters we check it against what the funder publishes now. Some foundations file “none” against the deadline question even when they run one.
What the record buys you is direction a directory cannot give: which funders actually move money toward work like yours, at what size, how often, whether they will read a request from you at all, and which human being to send it to. Every claim on your match sheet resolves to a filing or a published page you can open and read yourself.
Grant Matching finds the money. These decide what you do about it.
A match tells you a funder is reachable. It does not tell you whether the gift is safe to accept. Run the funder, its principals, or a prospective board member before the money is on your books.
When a funder matters enough to prepare for properly — its giving history, its leadership, its other grantees, and what has been written about it — in one sourced report.
The standing job behind the brief. Re-run the match on a schedule, watch named funders for new filings, and put the result in an inbox instead of a dashboard.
Send us your EIN. We will run the match and walk you through the funders it surfaces, the evidence behind each one, and the people worth approaching first.
Get a Grant Match