Scraping Nonprofit Grant Databases for Lead Generation: Extracting Contacts from Foundation Directories, Grant Recipient Lists, IRS Form 990 Filings, Community Foundation Portals, Corporate Giving Programs and Government Grant Award Databases
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Why Grant Data Is the Richest Public Dataset Most Businesses Ignore
The nonprofit and philanthropic sector generates an enormous amount of publicly accessible data through regulatory filings, transparency requirements, and voluntary disclosure practices. Every private foundation in the United States files IRS Form 990-PF annually, disclosing its assets, grants made, officers, directors, and trustees. Every nonprofit organization files Form 990, disclosing its revenue, expenses, program activities, and key personnel. Federal agencies publish detailed grant award data through USASpending.gov and agency-specific databases. Community foundations publish annual reports listing their grants, fund advisors, and community impact.
This data is public by design -- the tax-exempt status that foundations and nonprofits enjoy comes with a transparency obligation, and the government grant databases exist to provide accountability for public spending. Yet most businesses that serve nonprofits and foundations -- grant writing consultants, fundraising software companies, nonprofit accounting firms, capacity building consultants, nonprofit technology vendors -- are not systematically extracting contacts from these databases. They are relying on referrals, conference attendance, and generic web searches to find prospects, while thousands of qualified leads sit in publicly available grant databases.
IRS Form 990 and 990-PF Filings
IRS Form 990 (filed by nonprofit organizations) and Form 990-PF (filed by private foundations) are the most comprehensive sources of nonprofit and foundation contact information available. These forms are required to be made publicly available, and several organizations aggregate and provide free access to the filings.
ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer (projects.propublica.org/nonprofits) provides searchable access to Form 990 data for millions of nonprofit organizations, including electronic filings that can be downloaded in XML format. The IRS itself provides bulk download access to electronic 990 filings through its Amazon Web Services data repository. Candid (formerly GuideStar and Foundation Center) provides searchable access to 990 data with additional analysis and filtering capabilities.
From Form 990 filings, you can extract the organization's name, address, and EIN (Employer Identification Number), the names and titles of officers, directors, trustees, and key employees (Part VII), compensation information for those individuals, the organization's total revenue, total expenses, and net assets, program service descriptions (Part III), and for foundations filing 990-PF, a complete list of grants made (Part XV) including the recipient organization name, address, and grant amount.
Save search results pages from ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer or similar databases as HTML. Upload to Email Extractor to extract contact email addresses from the filing data. Not every 990 filing includes email addresses (the form itself does not have a dedicated email field), but many electronic filings include email addresses in the contact information section, and the organization's website (which is listed on the form) often contains staff email addresses.
Foundation Grant Recipient Lists
Private foundations and community foundations frequently publish lists of their grant recipients on their websites. These lists serve the foundation's transparency and public relations goals, and they are gold for lead generation because they identify organizations that have recently received grant funding -- meaning those organizations have active programs, are growing, and have demonstrated the capacity to manage grants (which often means they need the professional services that grant writing consultants, nonprofit accountants, and technology vendors provide).
Foundation websites typically list grant recipients by year, by program area, or by geographic focus. Some foundations provide detailed grant descriptions including the recipient organization, grant amount, project description, and grant period. Others provide only the recipient name and grant amount. Either format provides enough information to identify the organization and find its contact information.
To systematically extract grant recipient data, identify the foundations whose grantmaking aligns with your target market (foundations that fund arts organizations if you serve arts nonprofits, foundations that fund community health if you serve healthcare nonprofits, etc.). Visit each foundation's website and navigate to their grants database or annual report. Save the grant recipient list pages as HTML. Upload to Email Extractor to extract any email addresses that appear alongside the grant recipient listings.
For grant recipient organizations where email addresses are not listed on the foundation's page, visit each recipient organization's website to find staff contact information. Many nonprofit websites list their executive director, development director, and program staff with email addresses on their "About" or "Staff" page. Save these pages as HTML and extract contacts with Email Extractor.
Federal Grant Award Databases
USASpending.gov is the federal government's official source for grant award data. The database contains detailed information about every federal grant award, including the recipient organization's name, address, and DUNS/UEI number, the awarding agency and program, the award amount and period of performance, the project description, and the principal investigator or project director.
NIH RePORTER (reporter.nih.gov) provides detailed information specifically about National Institutes of Health research grants, including the principal investigator's name, institution, abstract, and publication history. For businesses that serve research institutions, NIH RePORTER is particularly valuable because it identifies not just the institution but the specific researcher and their funded project.
The National Science Foundation Award Search (nsf.gov/awardsearch) provides similar data for NSF-funded grants. The Department of Education's Grant Award Database provides data for education grants. Each agency's database has its own search interface and export capabilities.
Export search results from these databases. Grant award data frequently includes organizational email addresses or references to organizational contact pages. Upload exported data files (CSV, XML, or saved HTML pages) to Email Extractor to extract email addresses from the award records. After extraction, segment contacts by grant type (research, program, capacity building -- determines which services the organization is likely to need), by grant size (larger grants indicate larger organizations with bigger budgets for professional services), by geographic location (for businesses that serve nonprofits in specific regions), and by program area (health, education, arts, environment -- determines industry-specific messaging).
Community Foundation Annual Reports
Community foundations -- place-based philanthropic organizations that manage pooled charitable funds for a specific geographic area -- publish annual reports that contain rich contact data. These reports typically list the foundation's board of directors and staff (with titles), fund advisors (individuals who manage donor-advised funds within the community foundation), grant recipients (organizations that received grants from the community foundation's competitive grantmaking programs), and donors (individuals and businesses that have established funds or made contributions to the community foundation).
Community foundation annual reports are usually available as PDF downloads on the foundation's website. Download the PDF and upload to Email Extractor to extract any email addresses embedded in the report. Note that Email Extractor processes text-based PDFs; if the annual report is a scanned image PDF, it will not contain extractable text. Most community foundations publish their annual reports as text-based PDFs with design elements, and these are compatible with extraction.
For community foundation contacts where email addresses are not in the annual report, use the foundation's website staff directory and board listing to find contact information. Community foundation staff and board members are typically involved in the local philanthropic community and are valuable referral sources for businesses serving nonprofits.
