The Problem Was Never Finding Grants

Every grant research product, ours included, is tempted to sell the same promise: we will help you find grants you did not know existed. It is an easy promise to make. It is also not the complaint grant professionals actually have.

This is the first post in a series built from something we did this summer. We read 84 sources on what makes grant seeking painful: sector surveys, practitioner forums, software reviews, consultants with nothing to sell. We sorted every complaint into piles and counted. The pile labeled "I cannot find opportunities" had 21 sources in it. The pile labeled "I cannot tell whether this opportunity is worth my time" had 40.

The survey says matching, not finding

GrantStation's State of Grantseeking has asked grant seekers about their greatest challenge every year since 2012. Researching and finding grants has never once ranked first. In the last two reports it sat behind lack of time and staff and behind competition for finite awards, and its share has fallen two years straight: 15% in 2024, 12.5% in 2025, 11.9% in 2026.

Read the wording of the item in the 2025 report closely: "difficulty in finding grant opportunities that matched with specific missions, locations, or programs." The survey itself codes the problem as matching. Nobody is short on grant listings. They are short on listings that fit.

118 matches, 3 prospects

The clearest picture of this came from a grant writer on r/nonprofit describing a free trial of a commercial matching tool. It returned 118 "well aligned" matches. After reading through them by hand, the list came down to 5 long shots and 3 realistic prospects. Some were ruled out for requirements like "50% of BOD must be female" or "operating budget must be below $50K." One of the matches had not awarded a grant since 2010.

That is not an empty funnel. It is a full funnel that the buyer has to filter by hand, one open tab at a time. Instrumentl's own survey of 1,031 grant professionals puts a number on that labor: 3.4 hours a week spent just deciding whether a grant is worth pursuing. It is a vendor survey and the hours are self-reported, so treat it as a rough size rather than a measurement. It is still the better part of half a working day, every week, spent saying no.

An independent consultant, Nonprofit Nomad, put the whole thing in one line: "The challenge isn't finding grants. The challenge is finding the right grants."

Why more results make it worse

A directory search starts from every funder in the country and narrows. Each filter you apply is a guess about which fields matter, and the fields that decide fit are mostly not in the database: a county-level service area, a board composition rule, an unwritten preference for organizations the program officer already knows. So the tool errs toward inclusion, calls it alignment, and hands the judgment back to you in the form of a longer list.

More results feel like progress. For a one-person development shop they are the opposite. Every extra match is another page of guidelines to read before you can rule it out.

Start from who already got funded

The approach we built GrantSnag around runs the question the other way. Instead of asking which funders might like an organization like yours, you name an organization that does work like yours and read who has already funded it, straight off the foundations' filed 990-PF returns. A foundation that has written checks to three organizations like yours has answered the fit question with money. A mission statement that sounds like yours has not answered anything.

That changes what the list is made of. It is shorter, and every row on it is a receipt rather than a guess. We wrote about the reasoning behind it in Peer Search IS the Geography Filter.

What peer search does not do

It does not make the call for you, and I would be doing exactly what this post criticizes if I said otherwise.

Our search matches on the recipient's name as the foundation typed it. That has two failure modes, and we have hit both in our own research. A name that is too generic returns somebody else's funders: we once searched a small Florida nonprofit with a common name and got back a tidy list of Connecticut family foundations, all of them funding a different organization that happened to share the name. A name that is too specific returns nothing at all, because the foundation typed it differently. An earlier post walks through how to catch both, and those checks apply to our results as much as anyone's.

And even a clean peer list is a shortlist, not a decision. A funder that has backed organizations like yours may be committed elsewhere this cycle, or may not take unsolicited proposals, or may have a program officer who already knows who they want to fund. The grant record tells you who has said yes before. It cannot tell you whether they will say yes to you. That judgment is still yours, and in a later post in this series we will talk about the searches that dead-end anyway.

What changes is where you spend the hours. Not on ruling out 110 of 118 matches, but on the handful of funders with a track record of writing checks to work like yours.