Foundation Grant Prospector (990-PF Giving Data)

Find the foundations that can actually fund your nonprofit. Search US private foundations by cause, name, or state, and rank them by how much they give out each year (total grants paid from their latest IRS 990-PF), alongside their assets and filing history. Powered by the free public ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer data.

Built for nonprofits, grant writers, development teams, and researchers doing funder prospecting, so you spend your time on foundations with real giving capacity instead of guessing.

Why grants paid matters

Assets tell you how big a foundation is. Grants paid tells you how much it actually gives away. A foundation sitting on a large endowment but paying out little is a weak prospect. This Actor surfaces the giving number front and center and lets you filter on it.

What it does

• Searches ProPublica by your cause or name query, optionally restricted to a state.
• Pulls each foundation's latest IRS filing and extracts the giving and financial summary.
• Filters to confirmed private foundations (990-PF) and to a minimum grants-paid threshold, so the output is only real, fundable prospects.
• You can also pass a list of EINs to profile specific foundations directly.

Input

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Foundation name or cause keywords (for example health foundation, maternal, community).
eins	array	Specific foundation EINs to profile. When set, the query is skipped.
state	string	Optional 2 letter US state code (for example NC, TX, CO).
maxFoundations	integer	Max foundations to return. Default 10.
minGrantsPaidUsd	integer	Only return foundations that gave at least this much in their latest filing. Default 0.
privateFoundationsOnly	boolean	Only confirmed 990-PF private foundations. Default true.

Output example

{
    "ein": "841393308",
    "name": "Daniels Fund",
    "city": "Denver",
    "state": "CO",
    "nteeCode": "T22",
    "isPrivateFoundation": true,
    "latestFilingYear": 2023,
    "totalAssetsUsd": 1303622638,
    "totalRevenueUsd": 123024315,
    "grantsPaidUsd": 67434251,
    "filingPdfUrl": "https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/download-filing?path=...",
    "propublicaUrl": "https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/841393308",
    "scrapedAt": "2026-07-02T18:30:00.000Z"
}

Use cases

• Build a ranked prospect list of foundations by cause and geography
• Qualify funders by real giving capacity before you invest time in an application
• Enrich a CRM or grant pipeline with foundation financials and IRS links
• Feed an AI grant matching agent with fundable foundation targets

Honest limitations

• Every figure comes directly from the foundation's most recent IRS filing as published by ProPublica. When a value is not in the filing, the field is null. Nothing is estimated or fabricated.
• This Actor returns each foundation's total grants paid, assets, and revenue. It does not return the individual grant line items (who received each grant), because that detail is not available through a reliable public feed for recent filing years. If you need per grant recipient data, that lives in the raw IRS e-file XML for older years only.
• Financial data typically runs one to two filing years behind, since foundations file annually and processing takes time. Treat it as a picture of who funds and how much, not a live deadline feed.
• Search matches on organization names and text, so broad queries can surface similarly named organizations. The private-foundation and minimum-giving filters remove ones without real giving data.

Fair use

This Actor reads the free, public ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API at a polite rate. Please use the data responsibly and credit ProPublica and the IRS as the underlying sources.