By Ashley Schultz, Manager of Community Engagement
Long before the days of internet radio, there was a specific art to tuning an analog dial. You needed a delicate touch to find that perfect spot where the static dropped away, and the music came through sharp and clear. If your dial was even a fraction off, the signal was lost. You knew the radio station was playing your favorite song, but you could not enjoy it.
Searching for grants works similarly. Hundreds of millions of dollars are broadcast by federal, state, and foundation organizations each year, but if you do not tune in to the right channels, you will never know they exist. Many of the frustrations grantseekers share with the team at Grants Office do not stem from the perceived lack of available funds, but from organizations positioning their grant search ‘dial’ to the wrong frequencies.
Is your search full of static? When you crank the volume on an untuned radio, your favorite song is interrupted by jumbled snippets of different music and another station’s commercial break. In the world of grant seeking, this is exactly what happens when your search terms are too generic.
If you type a broad keyword like "Education" into a grant database, you are going to be met with a wall of noise. You might be looking to buy classroom tablets in Ohio, but your relevant results are buried alongside hundreds of grants for PhD fellowships in New York, teacher professional development grants in Arizona, and university construction grants in California. The right opportunity is technically there, but the background noise is so loud that you will close the webpage from search fatigue before you find it.
Or are you hitting dead air? If you search for "iPads for robotics club in Columbus," you may get only a few, if any, results. You have made your search terms so precise that the grant catalog cannot connect your specific product requests to the more generic broadcasts of "STEM" or "Digital Literacy" from the funders. You are likely to find that silence is discouraging - potentially leading you to conclude that there is simply no funding available for your project.
PRO TIP: Grantmakers fund solutions, not shopping carts.
It is rare to find a grant named after a piece of equipment or single line item in your budget (e.g., "The School Laptop Grant"). More often, federal, state, and foundation funders focus their support on the outcomes that purchases could generate.
When choosing your keywords, avoid fixating on what you need to buy and shift your thoughts to what problem you need to solve. The funder does not particularly care about buying a new van. They care that seniors in your community cannot get to their doctor’s appointments. If you search for an item, you get silence. If you search for a solution, you get results.
Finding the right funding frequency.
To lock onto your organization’s frequency and ensure you see relevant opportunities without too much background noise, consider brushing up on your analog radio skills and adjusting the dials inside your preferred grant database(s).
Tip #1 | Review Your Current Search Terms and Adjust. Searching is an inherently iterative process. When exploring a grants database for the first time, consider your first search as a starting point – or a testing ground – to understand how the platform works and what kinds of results you should expect moving forward.
As you proceed in later rounds of funding searches, do not forget to pause and adjust your terms before you start opening hundreds of Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs). If you find yourself drowning in over 1,000 results, take a moment to fine-tune your focus and get more specific (e.g., changing your search for "Mental Health" to "Youth Behavioral Health"). On the other hand, if you hit a pocket of dead air with fewer than ten relevant results, consider broadening the scope of your keywords (e.g., changing "iPads" to its more generic "tablets” or the education industry standard “one-to-one”).
And if you are still struggling, consider checking adjacent channels that use synonyms of your current search terms. A state funder may support "Job Training" activities, for example, but they may be broadcasting their support with words like "Workforce Development" or “Business Development” instead.
Tip #2 | Think Like a Funder. One of the biggest challenges to a successful search is understanding the difference between what you need to purchase with funding and what a grantmaker wants to achieve by sharing its resources. Grantseekers often search for a specific shopping list of items (e.g., body-worn cameras, security alarms, cybersecurity software), while funders trend towards language specific to their desired outcomes (e.g., improved rural health; increased transparency; better test scores) and the specific population groups, geographic regions, and/or innovative practices they want to see supported along the way.
Be sure your search terms effectively translate your organization’s internal needs into those that a funder wants to hear. For instance, if you need funding for new playground equipment, look for grants supporting "Community Development” or “Nutrition & Wellness.” Similarly, a request for downtown Wi-Fi could fall under the broader funder umbrellas of "Tourism” or “Smart Cities," while staffing costs for a telemedicine program could be framed as "Rural Development.” By searching for the solution rather than the line item, you align your grantseeking dial to funders’ frequencies.
Tip #3 | Use the Presets. Sometimes, the best way to start thinking like a funder is to simply look at the buttons they have installed on the dashboard of their grants database to see how they categorize the world. If multiple rounds of searching are giving you too much static, try using the “Browse by Category" feature found in most online funding sites.
By selecting a pre-defined category like "Human Services," "Arts & Culture," or "Higher Education," you are tapping directly into the taxonomy the database uses to organize its grant programs. This approach guarantees you are tuned into a valid frequency without the risk that a specific keyword typo or a missing synonym is hiding opportunities from you.
Tip #4 | Master Boolean Operators. To take more control over your search results, consider utilizing Boolean operators. These simple logic commands allow you to build more complex queries that explicitly tell the database what to include and what to ignore.
|
Operator
|
Action
|
Search Example
|
|
AND
|
Narrow results. Use this operator to ensure that both terms appear in the search results.
|
"Arts" AND "Rural”
|
|
OR
|
Broaden results. Use this operator to ensure at least one term appears in a single search effort.
|
"Mental Health" OR "Behavioral Health"
|
|
NOT
|
Exclude results. Use this operator to remove specific words that are cluttering your results.
|
"Education" NOT "Scholarship"
|
|
" "
|
Find an exact phrase. Use this operator to force the database to find these words together, in this specific order.
|
"Professional Development"
|
|
( )
|
Group commands. Use this operator to instruct the system to process your request inside the parentheses first (like a math equation).
|
("Arts" OR "Culture") AND "Youth"
|
|
* (Asterisk)
|
Leverage root words. Use this operator to find both the root word and all derivatives.
|
Child* (Finds: Child, Children, Childhood)
|
Mastering these operators transforms a simple keyword search into a precise filter. By explicitly telling the database what to keep and what to cut, you ensure that the only signal coming through is the one you want to hear.
Tip #5 | Respect the Search Venue. Remember that not all radios work the same way. A common mistake is treating a specialized grant database exactly like Google. Google is built for natural language and loves long conversational prompts like "Where can I find grants for a fire station?"
Grant databases, however, more often rely on structured data. When using specialized databases like the US government’s www.grants.gov, or Grants Office’s new platform Communities, shorter is often better. Instead of typing a long sentence, rely on these systems’ built-in filters (e.g., Geography, Eligibility, Funder Type) to do the heavy lifting. Once you’ve fully leveraged those presets, find a single, sharp keyword to finish your fine-tuning.
Tip #6 | Don’t be Afraid to Start Over. If you have tried every combination of keywords and filters and have yet to see the perfect list of funding opportunities, it might be time to step away from the database entirely.
Remember that a grants database is only an aggregated snapshot of funds available at that moment in time. Searching these catalogs should not be considered a replacement for researching and understanding the funding landscape as a whole.
If you find a grantmaker that looks like a potential match in the database, but you are not finding a specific grant opportunity that aligns with your needs, visit their website. While you are there, review their press releases, read their strategic plan, and look at their recent awards list. You may discover that while they do not fund your search query for "After School Reading," they do support "Workforce Readiness," allowing you to adjust your project focus accordingly.
Finally, accept that consistent silence may be a signal in itself: funding might not currently exist for your specific project or organization type. When this happens, no amount of keyword tweaking will force a result. Instead, bring your leadership team together and head back to the drawing board. You may need to retool the project’s scope, find a partner organization to expand your eligibility, or completely rethink your approach to align with what funders are supporting in today’s landscape.
PRO TIP: Automate Your Listening
The modern world does not require you to sit by the radio 24/7 to catch your favorite song. Once you have fine-tuned your keywords and filters to get that perfect list of results, save your search.
Most grant databases allow you to save your criteria and set up email alerts. Let the database do the work for you, notifying you only when a new opportunity starts broadcasting on your specific frequency.
Ultimately, the goal of refining your grant search is not just to generate a lengthy list of potential funders – it is to uncover the ideal fiscal resources that help your organization move its mission forward. By filtering out the dead air and static, you save your most valuable resource: your mental energy.
Instead of burning out on the search, you can channel that energy into writing the proposal, building the relationship, and executing successful projects. The opportunities are out there. You just need to be on the right frequency to find them.