Why You Cannot Find Your Own Nonprofit in a Foundation's Grant List
Last week I wrote about the grant lists foundations file as the words "SEE ATTACHED SCHEDULE" instead of a list of names. This week is the opposite problem, and it is more common. The list is there. Your organization is on it. You still cannot find it.
Here is the check we run before we ever tell somebody a foundation has not funded them.
The obvious query is wrong
Every nonprofit has an EIN. Every grant in a 990-PF has a field for the recipient's EIN. So the obvious way to ask "which foundations have given to us" is to search the grant record for your EIN.
We measured that field this morning, across the whole corpus: 9,254,567 of 13,298,859 grant rows have no recipient EIN at all. That is 69.6%.
It is not a gap in our loading. It is what the foundations filed. Broken out by year:
| Year | Grant rows | No recipient EIN |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2,509,116 | 70.8% |
| 2021 | 2,548,008 | 72.2% |
| 2022 | 2,651,200 | 70.8% |
| 2023 | 2,584,548 | 72.8% |
| 2024 | 2,133,327 | 62.3% |
| 2025 | 428,311 | 92.0% |
The most recent year is the worst year. If you search the grant record by EIN, you are searching about a third of it, and you are nearly blind to what happened last year.
What that costs, on one real organization
Second Chance Outreach is a nonprofit in Stanwood, Washington, EIN 83-2445419. We used them as a test case because their name is common enough to break both halves of the search.
Search the grant record for their EIN: 8 funders.
Search on their EIN or their name constrained to Washington: 21 funders.
Thirteen funders missing, and they are not small ones. Every row below has a blank in the recipient EIN field:
| Funder | Year | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| The Norcliffe Foundation | 2024 | $50,000 |
| Liberty Mutual Foundation | 2024 | $30,000 |
| The Norcliffe Foundation | 2022 | $25,000 |
| Liberty Mutual Foundation | 2023 | $25,000 |
| Liberty Mutual Foundation | 2022 | $20,000 |
| The Norcliffe Foundation | 2021 | $10,000 |
| Puget Sound Energy Foundation | 2022 | $8,000 |
Norcliffe gave them money in three separate years and is one of their largest repeat funders. On an EIN search, Norcliffe looks like a foundation that has never heard of them.
This is the part that should worry you if you are using any tool to build a prospect list. The EIN-only answer does not look broken. Eight funders is a perfectly reasonable number. Nothing about it raises a flag until you check it against the names, and by then you have already written a letter to Norcliffe introducing yourself.
So search the name instead. That breaks too.
Here is every distinct way "Second Chance Outreach" appears as a recipient in the record:
- Stanwood, WA, and also "Second Chance Outreach dba Hope for Homi", Stanwood, WA
- Burlington, WA (twice, different capitalization)
- Mount Vernon, WA, and also "Mt Vernon", WA
- Everett, WA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Omaha, NE
- Ringgold, VA, and "Second Chance Outreach Ministries", Ringgold, VA
- Hendersonville, TN
- Ypsilanti, MI
- Lovejoy, GA, and Atlanta, GA, filed as "NewLife-Second Chance Outreach" and "New Life-Second Chance Outreach"
- Milton, FL, filed as "Second Chance Outreach Reentry and Education Development Inc"
Eighteen spellings. At least nine different organizations. One of them is even the same organization in the same county with the city abbreviated two ways.
Search the name with no geography and you inherit somebody else's funders, in Georgia, presented with real EINs and real dollar amounts and real years. It looks exactly like a correct answer.
The other direction is worse
A name that is too short pulls in strangers. A name that is too long finds nothing, and nothing is more dangerous, because a zero reads like a clean fact and nobody goes looking for what it hid.
The Parsonsburg Volunteer Fire Company in Maryland is a good example. Search that name and you get nothing at all. The record does not carry the word "Volunteer." It files them as Parsonsburg Fire Co Inc, and under that name the Franklin P and Arthur W Perdue Foundation gave them $75,000 in 2025 for equipment for a new engine tanker, plus $10,000 in 2020.
If you had accepted the first zero, you would have concluded that a fire company with a $75,000 grant from a major regional foundation has no foundation funding. And Perdue, already one of their donors, would have gone on your prospect list as a cold introduction.
What to actually do
If you are researching by hand, this is the checklist:
- Never trust an EIN-only search. It is answering a narrower question than you asked, and it is missing about two thirds of the record.
- Search your legal name and your everyday name. Then search without "Volunteer," without "Incorporated," without "The." Your registered name and the name a grant officer typed in 2022 are frequently not the same string.
- Constrain by geography, always. Name alone crosses state lines. Your city, your neighboring city, your state.
- Read the recipient city on the actual grant line before you believe a match. A summary that says "30 foundations, $322,945" does not tell you those foundations are all in a different state, and that is the failure mode that survives every other check.
- Search abbreviations of your own city. Mount Vernon and Mt Vernon are two different answers.
If a tool hands you a confident "this funder has never given to you," ask it which of those five things it did.
Why we keep writing these
Every one of these posts comes out of something that nearly went wrong here. This one is not theoretical: our own research process has produced a wrong recipient match repeatedly, in both directions, and each time the wrong answer looked more polished than the right one. We wrote the rule down after the first time and it caught the next one.
The reason to tell you about it is simple. The most damaging sentence a funding tool can produce is "this foundation does not fund organizations like yours," delivered about a foundation that has been writing you checks for three years. The data is good enough to find that grant. It is just not good enough to find it the easy way.
Run both before you conclude a foundation has never funded you.