What Your Members Actually Need From a Funding Portal

Your members do not care which level of government a dollar comes from. They care whether it exists, whether it fits, and when it closes. A funding portal that answers only one of those questions for only one source of money gets used once and then forgotten.

This track is for the people who commission a portal: economic development organizations, Small Business Development Centers, chambers, incubators and accelerators, membership associations, and community foundations. You will not write code in this course. You will learn what to ask for, how to judge what you’re shown, and how to leave with a one-page spec that a developer, a vendor, or OpenGrants Build can work from.

This first lesson is about the need itself. Most portals fail before a line of code is written, because nobody wrote down what members were actually trying to find.

The four sources of money, plus the one people forget

When a member asks “where’s the funding,” they are asking about at least five different systems at once. Each one publishes in a different place, on a different schedule, in a different format.

Two facts make this table hard to live with.

First, Grants.gov is federal only. It lists opportunities from federal grant-making agencies. It does not list state programs, local programs, or foundations. A portal built on Grants.gov alone covers the part of the landscape that was already the easiest to search.

Second, a large share of “state” money started federal and is run by the state. The U.S. Treasury’s State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI), for example, is a nearly $10 billion program that sends funds to states, the District of Columbia, territories and Tribal governments, which then design their own programs for small businesses. A member looking for that money will not find it as a single federal listing. They will find it, if at all, on a state site, under a state program name.

Why federal-only portals read as toys

A federal-only portal fails in a specific, predictable way. A member types in their business, sees a list of national programs written for universities, research institutions and large nonprofits, and concludes there is nothing for them. They are usually wrong, but the portal taught them to stop looking.

Three things happen next:

1. The member leaves with a false negative. They believe no funding exists for businesses like theirs, when the local facade program, the state training reimbursement, and a regional foundation’s small business fund were all open.
2. Your staff get the question anyway. The portal was supposed to reduce “where’s the funding” emails. Instead it adds a round trip: member tries the portal, finds nothing, emails your program manager.
3. The portal loses credibility for the next launch. Members remember tools that wasted their time. Your next attempt starts with a trust deficit.

The fix is not “add more federal programs.” It is coverage across the five sources in one place, filtered to the member in front of it.

The stale “funding resources” page

Before most organizations commission a portal, they have a funding resources page. You probably have one. It usually looks like this:

• A list of 20 to 60 links, some to programs, some to agency home pages
• A few programs that closed two years ago
• A PDF of state incentives last updated when the previous program manager was here
• A line that says “contact us for help finding funding”

This page decays for a structural reason, not a staffing failure. Funding programs open, close, change amounts, change eligibility, and get renamed on their own schedules. Keeping a static list current means someone re-checking every link on a schedule, forever. Nobody’s job description contains “re-verify 60 links monthly,” so it stops.

How to audit yours in 20 minutes:

1. Open the page. Count the links.
2. Click every one. Mark each as: live and open, live but closed or no current round, broken, or home page only (links to an agency, not a program).
3. For every live program, note whether the page tells a member the deadline.
4. Calculate: live-and-open links with a deadline shown, divided by total links.

That ratio is the honest usefulness score of your current page. Keep the number. You will use it in Lesson 5 as your baseline, and in your board one-pager as the “before.”

Contracts: the half most portals ignore

Most funding portals only show grants. Many of your members, especially established small businesses, would benefit more from seeing government contract opportunities in their line of work.

Why contracts belong in the portal:

• Contracts are how governments buy. A grant funds a project the funder wants to support. A contract pays a business to deliver goods or services. For a landscaping company, an IT consultancy, or a food manufacturer, a contract is often the more natural fit.
• Small businesses have specific entry points. The SBA describes the basic requirements: register in the System for Award Management (SAM.gov), which issues a 12-character Unique Entity Identifier (UEI), and identify the NAICS codes that classify what the business sells. Some federal contracts are set aside for small businesses or for certified categories such as 8(a), HUBZone, service-disabled veteran-owned and women-owned small businesses.
• You probably already have partners for this. APEX Accelerators, which the SBA describes as providing technical assistance to businesses selling to federal, state and local governments, help with registration and opportunity research. A portal that surfaces contracts by NAICS code gives your members something concrete to bring to that appointment.

Your members are not one audience

“Our members” is several groups with different needs. Before you specify anything, name the segments. A typical EDO or chamber has some mix of:

If you run an SBDC, swap “members” for “clients.” America’s SBDC describes a network of nearly 1,000 local centers hosted by universities, colleges, state economic development agencies and private partners. Your clients arrive with a specific question and an advisor, so the portal’s job is to make the advising session start from a shortlist instead of a blank page.

A community foundation’s constituency looks different again: grantees and prospective grantees who need to see other funders’ programs alongside yours. An accelerator’s cohort is narrower: mostly early-stage companies, often asking the same SBIR question in month one.

The segments matter because the portal’s profile fields, filters and default views all follow from them. A portal designed for “businesses” in general ends up serving none of them well.

How to find out what members need

Do not guess. Ask, in a way that produces answers you can use in a spec. Use the member-needs survey template (b-member-needs-survey) for this. It is written to be sent as-is with light editing.

The procedure:

1. Pick your sample. Send to all members if your list is under a few thousand. Otherwise, send to a random sample plus everyone who has asked your staff about funding in the last year.
2. Ask about behavior, not interest. “Would you use a funding portal?” gets a yes from everyone and tells you nothing. “In the last 12 months, did you look for a grant, loan program or government contract? Where did you look?” tells you what they actually do.
3. Ask which sources they need. Use the five-source list from this lesson. Let them pick all that apply.
4. Ask how they want to hear about opportunities. Email digest, text, a page they check, or a staff member who calls. The answer shapes Lesson 2’s design more than any feature list.
5. Ask what they’d tell you about their organization. Sector, size, location, stage, certifications. This tells you which profile fields members will tolerate filling in.
6. Pull your own records. Count the funding questions your staff answered in the last 12 months. Categorize them by source. This number is often more persuasive to a board than survey responses.
7. Write a one-paragraph need statement. Example below.

That need statement becomes the first section of your capstone spec in Lesson 6.

What your members do not need

Just as important. Cut these early:

• A list of every opportunity in the country. Members need the ones that fit them, ranked. Volume without filtering is the stale resources page at larger scale.
• A promise. Members should never be told they qualify or will win. They need to see what the funder published and decide whether to apply. Lesson 3 covers how to design for this.
• Another login they have to remember. If the only way to learn about a new opportunity is to log in and check, most members won’t. Lesson 2 covers email-first design.
• Staff time you don’t have. If the portal only works when your program manager curates it weekly, it will decay the same way the resources page did.

Do this now in OpenGrants

Search the way one of your members would, so you can see the gap between what a federal-only source shows and what full coverage shows.

1. Start a 7-day trial at ops.opengrants.io/signup (an account is required to search; after the trial the app is $9/month).
2. Pick one real member segment from the table above. Write down a typical profile: sector, location, size, stage.
3. Run a grant search for that profile. Note how many results are federal, state, local and foundation.
4. Run a contract search using a NAICS code that matches that segment.
5. Write two sentences: what a member in that segment would have found on your current resources page, and what they would find here.

Keep those two sentences. They go into your board one-pager in Lesson 4.

Start your 7-day trial and search as a member would (opens in a new tab)

Check yourself

1. Name the five sources of funding opportunities your members need, and where each is published.
2. Why does a Grants.gov-only portal systematically produce false negatives for small businesses?
3. Your resources page has 38 links and 5 of them are open programs with deadlines shown. What is its usefulness score, and what does that tell your board?
4. Which of your member segments would benefit most from contract opportunities, and why?
5. Write your organization’s one-paragraph need statement. Does it name the sources, the members, and how they want to be notified?

Sources

• Grants.gov — Grant-Making Agencies — Grants.gov covers federal grant-making agencies
• U.S. Treasury — State Small Business Credit Initiative (SSBCI) — SSBCI size and state, territory and Tribal administration
• SBA — Basic requirements for government contracting — SAM.gov registration, 12-character UEI, NAICS codes
• SBA — Federal contracting assistance (APEX Accelerators) — APEX Accelerators’ role for federal, state and local contracting
• America’s SBDC — About Us — SBDC network context for readers who run or partner with an SBDC