OpenGrants tracks roughly 5,500 funding organizations — federal agencies, state programs, foundations — searchable by mission and topic rather than by open notice.
When to search funders rather than grants
When a grant search comes back empty. An empty grant result means nothing is open right now matching that phrasing. It does not mean nobody funds the work. Funders operate on cycles, and the organization that will post next quarter’s notice exists today.
When you are building a pipeline rather than chasing a deadline. Relationships with funders take months. Finding the right twenty organizations is a better use of an afternoon than finding the three notices closing this month.
When you want to understand a space. The funders in a field tell you what that field’s money actually cares about, which shapes how you write.
What a funder profile gives you
Pulling up a specific funder returns the full profile plus a live portfolio — their open grants and contracts, and their funded-project history where it is available.
That history is the useful part. What an organization actually funded is far more reliable than what its website says it prioritizes, and the gap between the two is routinely large.
Searching well
Plain English works: “foundations funding climate work in the Midwest”, “federal agencies funding broadband”. Ranking is semantic, so you are describing a space rather than matching keywords.
Going deeper on private funders
For US foundations, their 990 filings are public and show grants actually made — recipient, amount, often purpose. That is the research method that underpins serious foundation work, and it costs nothing. See How to conduct a 990 tax form lookup.
Several individual funders are profiled in depth in the guides, including Mulago, Blue Meridian, Draper Richards Kaplan and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation — each covering whether they accept applications at all, which is the question that matters first.