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Form 990s: Your New Best Friend for Grant Research

The most effective grant writers wear many hats as expert storytellers, project managers, data crunchers, reporting masters, and researchers.

Upfront research on funders and their grants is integral to successful grant seeking because it ensures your organization spends its time as efficiently as possible. By finding the right insights to make educated comparisons and inferences, you can focus your grant writing efforts on the most relevant opportunities that you’re likely to win.

However, grant research can be tricky. While many modern grant databases, directories, and even AI-powered analysis tools can help streamline much of the work, simply using the right tool isn’t enough.

Successful grant seekers know how to take their research a step further by really getting to know their potential funders. How?

Look no further than foundations’ Form 990s.

Why Form 990s Help With Grant Research

Tax-exempt organizations, non-exempt charitable trusts, and Section 537 political agencies must file an annual tax return via IRS Form 990 each year. These documents provide glimpses into organizations’ finances—revenue, expenses, and grants paid (including recipients). The IRS uses this information to confirm whether an organization has stuck to its tax-exempt purposes.

(Note that private foundations may only publish abridged documents that outline overall gains, losses, and contributions rather than complete 990s.)

Funders’ Form 990s are valuable grant research assets for a few reasons:

Foundations aren’t known for being the most transparent organizations. If you’ve researched potential grants before, you’ve almost certainly run into outdated, vague, or confusing information about their funders. Form 990s give you direct, current visibility into how these organizations operate.

Form 990s can reveal potential connections between the funder and your organization and clearer insights into how well your missions align.

The best indicator of future giving is past giving. As a grant seeker, Form 990s give you the clearest, easiest-to-understand, and most up-to-date picture of a funder’s past giving activities. 

By finding this resource and knowing what information to look for, you can seriously boost your grant research. Understanding a funder’s giving patterns, history of funding missions and projects like (or unlike) yours, and any potential connections you share helps you choose which grants to prioritize, meaning you’ll drive more impact more efficiently.

Where to Find Foundation Form 990s

Before taking a closer look at the specific information to look for in a Form 990, let’s answer a more immediate question: Where do you find these documents?

First, check out the foundation’s website. Like other nonprofits, foundations publish their Form 990s. They may be buried in websites’ About sections, often on pages relating to “Governance” or “Financial Statements.” For example, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s financials page is linked on its primary About page.

Directory tools can help you quickly compare the 990s of multiple foundations. Candid offers a 990 Finder as part of its Foundation Directory tools. 

Other free and paid grant research databases also include 990 comparison features—Instrumentl’s 990 tools stand out as particularly helpful. And as AI makes its way into more databases and grant writing tools, we can expect to see more advanced resources emerge that scrape and compile 990 data.

What to Look for in a Foundation’s Form 990

You’ve found the latest Form 990 of a foundation offering a grant your nonprofit may want to pursue—what next?

Take a close look at this information:

Contributions, gifts, and grants paid in the form’s Operating and Administrative Expenses section, which gives you an immediate glimpse at the funder’s finances and recent payouts.
Timeframes of grants paid, which may span a few years’ forms. This information helps gauge how much funding is available for disbursement in multi-year grant cycles.
Values of grants paid. It’s not uncommon for a funder’s average payouts to be lower than their published grant maximums or ceilings.
Names and locations of recipients, which can help you confirm your alignment with the funder’s giving history and clarify any vagueness in its grant descriptions.
Lists of funder officers, directors, trustees, managers, etc. Your board or staff may have connections to these individuals that you can tap into.

For in-depth instructions on locating all of this information on Form 990s, check out Learn Grant Writing’s Form 990 research guide. 

How Do You Use This Information?

The primary (and most immediate) use case for Form 990 data is that it allows you to confirm your organization’s alignment with the funder’s giving history. Funders typically focus on funding specific types of projects, missions, and/or nonprofits operating in particular geographic regions. Although their websites may say one thing (or use vague wording), their track record of actual funding detailed in their Form 990s will give you concrete insights into your likelihood of catching the funder’s attention.

Secondarily, you can use 990 information to make inferences about the funder’s giving patterns or current funding cycles. As mentioned above, tracking payouts over a few years allows you to estimate the completion of multi-year funding programs and find average actual payouts, which may be lower than the funder’s stated maximums. A working familiarity with nonprofit accounting practices will help you navigate these statements.

With some extra digging, the information in a Form 990 also helps you gauge a funder’s competitiveness and your overall likelihood of winning its grants. 

A funder’s win rate shows you the rough percentage of nonprofits that win funding after applying to its opportunities. Form 990s give you an essential input for this equation: the number of individual grants awarded in the funder’s past cycle. Compare this number to the number of applications received (sometimes available online but more reliably found by contacting the funder directly) to calculate the approximate win rate. 

Overall, information gathered and inferred from Form 990s is invaluable for prioritizing grant opportunities. High win rates plus strong alignment generally mean you’ve got a good chance of winning a grant. Combine these insights with the grant’s rough ROI (its dollar value compared to the amount of work you’ll put into applying) to get a more complete picture of how worth your time a particular opportunity might be.

You may assign different weights to grant factors based on your organization’s current funding priorities. For instance, you may risk a lower win rate for a grant with a very high ROI or vice versa if the trade-off makes sense for your needs. 

However you ultimately decide to approach the prioritization process, make sure Form 990s are part of your toolkit. The insights they contain can transform your grant seeking approach from shot-in-the-dark to confident, boosting your nonprofit’s impact (and reducing your stress!) along the way.