About Funderscope
Funderscope is a free research site for small nonprofits. It shows which private foundations and grantmaking charities gave to organizations like yours, how much and how often, from their own public IRS filings.
What it is built from
Private foundations file Form 990-PF with the IRS each year and list every grant they paid. Public charities that make grants, such as community foundations and United Ways, file Form 990 and list their grants to organizations on Schedule I, which only requires grants over $5,000. The IRS publishes both in bulk.
This build holds IRS submission years 2022 through 2026: 579,101 private-foundation returns (Form 990-PF) listing 8,586,642 grants, and 1,613,596 Form 990 returns, of which 227,297 list 4,323,700 grants on Schedule I. They cover tax years 2019 through 2025. Organization names, locations and cause classifications come from the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File.
How matching and measurement work
- Matching. Form 990-PF names a grant’s recipient by name and address only. We match those to registered organizations in the Business Master File, and test the matcher against recipients whose EIN a Schedule I filer reported itself. A recipient we cannot match still appears on its funder’s page, exactly as the funder wrote it.
- Cause. A grant’s cause is the NTEE major group the IRS assigns to the organization that received it, not a reading of the grant’s purpose.
- The preselected-only box. This is the foundation’s own answer on Form 990-PF: whether it ticked the box saying it gives only to organizations it selects. A box left unticked is not a statement that it takes requests. Form 990 does not ask the question, so no grantmaking charity carries the mark either way.
- Computed figures. Typical (median) grants, repeat-funding rates and counts are computed from the filings, and each page says which numbers are ours. Figures from the two forms are never added together or compared, because of the $5,000 Schedule I floor.
The measured accuracy of the matching, and what the data cannot tell you, are on the methodology page.
What it is not
Funderscope is not affiliated with the IRS or with any foundation or grantmaker it lists, and no funder pays to appear or to be left out. It never takes part in a grant: it does not take, forward or review applications, and it handles no payment between anyone. A funder appearing here is a record of what it gave in the past, not an offer, an open call or a recommendation.
Who runs it
Funderscope runs this site independently. It is not part of any foundation, grantmaker, government agency or grant-writing firm. The 842 state and cause guides, the foundation and grantmaker profiles, search and the organization lookup are free to use, and the weekly email is free and opt-in.
Contact and corrections
Email hello@funderscope.com.
To report an error, send the address of the page, what is wrong, and if you can, the tax year and form where the right information appears. When our matching or a calculation is the cause, we correct it at the next rebuild. We do not change a figure that a filing itself reports: the filing is the record, and a correction to it goes to the IRS in an amended return.
Data sources and how often it is updated
- IRS Form 990 series downloads: every Form 990-PF and Form 990 return the IRS publishes electronically, in bulk batches.
- IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File: registered organizations, their locations and their NTEE classification.
A scheduled job checks the IRS for new batches each day. When one appears, the archive and this site are rebuilt from it, and the build is checked by our verification scripts before it goes live. A return reaches the IRS files months after it is filed, and roughly a year after the tax year it covers, so even the newest grants here were made about a year ago or more.
This site was built from the archive on . The newest IRS batch in the archive is 2026_TEOS_XML_09A, which we read on October 22, 2026.
How your own information is handled is on the privacy page.