An alert is a saved search that keeps running. You give it a name and a query, pick a cadence, and OpenGrants monitors for new opportunities that match.
Creating one
Name and query are required. The name is just a label for you — “Iowa broadband grants” beats “alert 1” when you have several.
Optional narrowing:
- Geography — where you work
- Applicant type — nonprofit, for-profit, municipality, tribal, individual, academic
- Frequency — daily or weekly. Weekly is the default and is right for most people.
Daily or weekly?
Weekly for almost everything. Funding does not move fast enough to justify a daily interrupt, and a weekly digest gets read.
Daily only when you are actively hunting in a fast-moving space, or working against a specific cycle you cannot miss.
Current delivery status
Worth being straight about: alerts save immediately, and email delivery of new matches is still rolling out. Your alert is stored and monitoring — the notification email is the part being finished.
Until that lands, check your alerts when you sit down to do funding work rather than waiting to be told.
Naming collisions
Alert names must be unique on your account. Creating a second alert called “Iowa broadband grants” returns an error rather than silently overwriting the first — delete or rename the existing one.
Plan limits
Some legacy accounts are capped at 5 alerts. Current subscriptions are unlimited.
What makes a good alert
The same thing that makes a good search: specific language about a real activity. “Rural broadband infrastructure” is a good alert query. “Technology” is not — it will match constantly and you will stop reading it, which is worse than having no alert.
Two or three sharp alerts beat ten broad ones.