Guide to Funding Information Services

SYFAB Guide to Funding Information Services

Click here to skip past all the introductions and get straight to the reviews

This guide is for organisations fundraising from grant-makers (i.e. charitable trusts, lottery funders, and government funders). It contains reviews of the main websites and software applications that have funding search tools and funding news services relevant to voluntary and community organisations. This guide covers services that are free to access, and then a further section on services you have to pay for.

I originally produced this guide in 2007 as a pdf available to members of my mailing list. It grew out of the SIFT software application that SYFAB produced to help groups find funding information online (in the same way as this website and all our planned SYFAB Information Service developments).

For each service, we give a short summary, a link to the website, details of the cost (if there is one), the main advantages and disadvantages of the service, and a conclusion.
Coming soon: Through our work on the SIFT software, we have produced guides to getting the best out of some of these websites. I am currently in the middle of updating these. When that’s done, I will put them on this site.

Comments and feedback
All the reviews in this guide are based on my opinions as someone who deals with funding information all the time. I hope that over time we can build up better guidance of the funding information services out there with your help. Have you used any of these services? What did you think? Do you have any tips and advice to share with other grant-seekers? Or any questions about how to use them and get the best out of them? Please let me have any comments or feedback either by commenting on this post, or by emailing me if you’d prefer your comments to stay private.

A note for organisations who run funding information services
All these reviews are based on my opinions of what makes a funding information service useful for small voluntary and community organisations. If your funding information service hasn’t been included and you think it should, please get in touch. Similarly, if you think i’ve been unfair about your service, please let me know. I’m always happy to work with anyone towards making sure funding information and advice is as useful as possible.

Introduction to Funding Information Services

Producing a funding information service which is straightforward to use, that produces accessible, relevant search results, has a comprehensive coverage of funders, and is kept well up-to-date is immensely difficult – in fact we aren’t aware of any. Funders and groups are so diverse and describe themselves in so many different ways that any attempt to try to capture this into a simple-to-use search tool will always miss something.

So, although in this guide we talk about advantages and disadvantages of each site, sometimes a disadvantage we note may actually be entirely necessary to make the service accessible. For example, some of the services cover charitable trusts only: although the ideal service would cover all the main sources of funding, for some, by restricting their coverage to trusts only, they are able to give a good and user-friendly search tool for a relatively limited number of funders rather than trying to cover too much and failing.

Our advice is to try a few out, and see what you can find. There isn’t just one that will give you a complete picture but by using a few, you might find a number of suitable funders for your organisation. But, when you find a funder that looks promising, you should definitely research it carefully, using the funder’s own information if available.

Good luck with your fundraising!

Contents (you can click the title to go straight to that review)

Section 1 – Free Services
Charitable Trusts on Merseyside
Funders Online
Government Funding
GrantNet
GrantsNet
Grants4
Guidestar
J4Bcommunity
Merseyside Funding Information Portal (MFIP)
Open4Community

Section 2 – Charged-for Services
Access Funds
Fit4Funding
Funderfinder Groups in Need (GIN)
Funding Information North East (FINE)
GrantFinder
Grants Online
ProFunding
Trustfunding

Section 1 - Free services
The following websites all offer at least some part of their funding information services free of charge.

Charitable Trusts on Merseyside
Summary: Information on 223 charitable trusts that will fund Merseyside groups (a combination of local and national trusts, so some of them are still relevant for groups outside Merseyside). Has a short summary of information on each trust. Can be searched by free text search. Produce a common application form and some general guidance for applying to trusts. Also has a funding news section which doesn’t seem to be updated very frequently.
Price: Free
Advantages: Summaries of each funder are ok.
Disadvantages: No guidance on how to search and actually not very easy to search anyway. Each funder is given a numerical code with no information on what this refers to. Not very comprehensive.
Conclusion: Limited use given the lack of supporting guidance and information, but might be worth browsing as it’s free.
Click here to go back to contents

Funders Online
Summary: A European initiative providing a search tool to find information about more than 1,000 funders operating in Europe (mainly companies and charitable trusts and foundations). For UK groups, the database contains local, regional and national UK funders. However, the information Funders Online produce on each funder isn’t entirely reliable, so you need to supplement this with your own research.
Price: Free
Advantages: Simple search mechanism.
Disadvantages: Can’t search for specific locations within UK. Results in alphabetical not best-match order. High proportion of outdated information. Not accessible using Firefox or Netscape.
Conclusion: Not reliable enough to spend too much time on.
Click here to go back to contents

Government Funding
Summary: Website with information on grant programmes available from 15 central government departments. The site is produced by J4B in conjunction with the Directory of Social Change. You can sign up for email updates.
Price: Free for organisations with a turnover of under £500,000. You need to register to use the site.
Advantages: When borwsing the full list of funding programmes, it puts open programmes to the top of the list and leaves closed programmes on the list. It is handy to be able to see both in this way as government programmes often open at short notice and have short application windows. Email alerts. Comprehensive information on each programme and links to relevant documents and websites.
Disadvantages: The search tool is very frustrating to use and not at all straightforward. Fortunately there aren’t too many funding programmes on this site, so you can just browse the full list or browse by Department, and ignore the search tool entirely. Only covers central government funding. The language used on each funder is often quite difficult.
Conclusion: As more departments sign up to add their funding programmes, the site becomes more useful for voluntary organisations – however, this also increases the need for an user-friendly search mechanism, something this site lacks. It is worth registering for email updates.
Click here to go back to contents

GrantNet
Summary: Provided by Grantfinder and using the same data (see separate guide to Grantfinder), Grantnet is bought in by local organisations to allow their user groups (small businesses or voluntary and community organisations) to do their own basic web-based funding searches. GrantNet is available on lots of different websites through what they call ‘local access points’. The search tool contains information on over 4,000 initiatives, including grants from the European Commission, UK Government, local government, and corporate sponsors and charitable trusts. The grantnet.com site I link to above is run with Business Link, so although it is available across the country, the search tool is less useful as it includes information aimed at small businesses. For voluntary and community organisations, other organisations such as CVSs have bought in a version of the GrantNet service which is a bit better tailored to the voluntary sector. I haven’t been able to find a list of which organisations have bought a version - if you want to find a local version for your area, the most likely organisations to have done so are your local authority or local CVS.
Price: Free
Advantages: Covers a range of funding sources, and quite a lot of them. The search tool on the voluntary and community organisations versions of the site is reasonably straightforward to use (unlike the Grantnet.com version). Seems to be updated reasonably frequently.
Disadvantages: Although straightforward to use, the search tool isn’t sophisticated enough to collect sufficient information to avoid inappropriate search results. For example, you can’t select high-level search terms (e.g health) which isn’t very helpful if the specific options given don’t match your work (to compensate, I selected all the options!). Results are listed in alphabetical order, not best-match.
Conclusion: Overall, this site has some useful information and can be used as part of a funding search, but there are limitations. Searches can produce some strange results and don’t seem to match up with the search criteria very well so you should do your own research on funders’ own websites when using the results of a GrantNet search. Results are also given in alphabetical order so no effort is made to pu thtem in any kind of ‘best-match’ order. A related problem is that Grantfinder’s database (which is where GrantNet’s information comes from) only includes information on funders who have explicitly agreed that it can be included, so the results are not a complete picture. The information given on each funder is pretty clear. Fairly brief summaries of each funder given so you need to supplement this with your own research.
Click here to go back to contents

GrantsNet
Summary: A free search tool to find information on sources of funding. The search tool is very simplistic, the results far from comprehensive, and some of the results are out of date.
Price: Free
Advantages: Very simple to use. Results give a summary of each funder and link to funder’s website.
Disadvantages: Out of date. Poor results.
Conclusion: Not a site to waste much time on.
Click here to go back to contents

Grants4 provides local funding portals. You can access several of the local portals for free to try Grants4 out. For example, click here for Grants4 Blackburn.
Summary: Grants 4 is produced by Grants Online (reviewed separately). They produce ‘funding portal’ websites that they sell to local authorities and other umbrealla organisations. The sites have grant searches, grant directories (effectively just the same as the grants search) and funding news sections. They are supposed to cover local information as well as regional and national, but in reality, there isn’t that much local information on any of them. They are supposed to be just for organisations in the particular local areas, but many of them allow access without having to register.
Price: For local authority areas that have bought a portal from Grants4, the site should be free to access for groups.
Advantages: Can search by category and sub-category for a more specific search. The information on each funder is well-presented and clear.
Disadvantages: The local funding information is sparse. The ‘Funding type’ question can give you misleading results. The results are given in alphabetical order, rather than ‘best-match’.
Conclusion: Not really comprehensive enough or particularly up-to-date, and the search mechanism can be misleading. Worth keeping an eye on the news updates.
Click here to go back to contents

Guidestar
Summary: A database of information on all charities in England and Wales including charitable trusts. The information is initially taken from the Charity Commission register, then individual charities are invited to add information to their entry on the site. This site is more useful than the Charity Commission register as a method of searching for funders as it has added the option to search for grant-making organisations only. However, be aware that the term ‘grant making organisations’ covers both those that give to community organisations and those that give to individuals in need.
Price: Free
Advantages: Can be used to find info on small, local charitable trusts that many funding search tools don’t cover.
Disadvantages: Not designed for funding searches so not straightforward to use for this purpose and can be frustrating and time-consuming. Covers charitable trusts only.
Conclusion: The site doesn’t do a great deal more than just re-presenting the information already available on the Charity Commission online register, albeit in a more accessible way. The addition of an advanced option to search for grant-making charities is helpful.
Click here to go back to contents

J4Bcommunity
Summary: A subscription-based website with regularly updated information on Government, European and Lottery funders, and a funding search tool. There are some limitations to be aware of when using this website for funding searches.
Price: There are two levels of membership: You can register for free and use the funding search tool and funding news. Upgrading to full membership allows you to look at full details of each funder. Subscription costs £49.99 for a month, £99.99 for six months or £149.99 for a year.
Advantages: News updated quite frequently, and you can register for email news alerts. Fairly straightforward to enter search criteria but what it gains through simplicity here, it loses by producing too many results.
Disadvantages: Only covers government, European and lottery funding (plus a couple of the biggest trusts and foundations). The search mechanism is not very helpful – results always include many that are entirely unrelated to the search terms (e.g. Community Radio Fund for a search for funding for mental health). The display of search results that j4b uses here and on Trustfunding is a bit odd. The results are grouped by main subject area and by funding source (i.e. government or lottery) which would be fine were it not for the problem of entirely unrelated results.
Conclusion: Worth registering for free and receiving email news alerts. Funding search tool is not great – you should certainly supplement the search results by doing your own research. As this site only covers information on government and lottery, you would definitely be able to find full information on each funding programme elsewhere without having to pay to subscribe.
Click here to go back to contents

Merseyside Funding Information Portal (MFIP)
Summary: A resource of funding news and information aimed at organisations in Merseyside but the Funding Updates news section is accessible to groups outside Merseyside and contains some relevant information.
Price: Free to access
Advantages: Has an RSS feed for people using news feeds. Adds items regularly. Information is well presented in clear categories.
Disadvantages: News site only. Not searchable. Merseyside-specific so not all of the news items are relevant for organisations elsewhere (like this website, in fact).
Conclusion: A useful up-to-date funding news service, let down a bit by not making the most of the categories and tags of the blog format that could have allowed items to be found through searches.
Click here to go back to contents

Open4Community provides local funding portals. One you can try out without having to register is Open 4 MLAYorkshire (although you can’t read the full information on each funder).
Summary: Another service from J4B, this one combines the coverage of government and lottery funding from J4Bcommunity and the trusts from Trustfunding into a series of ‘funding portals’ that J4B sells. The idea is that a local authority or CVS buys in the portal for their area and then provides local groups with free access to the service.
Price: For areas that have signed up to have their own portal, access should be free to community groups in that area. It costs several thousands of pounds per year to have the portal in the first place.
Advantages: Provides additional search tool for filtering results for charitable trusts (handy as a normal search produces hundreds of results for trusts). Offers the option to add funding success stories (case studies). Allows browsing by category as well as searching.
Disadvantages: Search tool is not particularly sensitive and sometimes gives strange results. Results are listed in alphabetical order. Results are split by source of funding which makes searching a bit more cumbersome.
Conclusion: Aimed at local authorities and larger infrastructure organisations who then make the local portal accessible to voluntary and community organisations in that area. However, the search really doesn’t work that well – many searches will give you a long list of results with nothing to help you work through them or filter them in any way.
Click here to go back to contents

Charged-for services

Most of these are subscription-based websites that you have to pay to access. The exceptions are Funderfinder Groups in Need which is a software application installed on individual computers, and Open4Community and Grants4 which set up funding portals paid for by local authorities or similar large agencies which are then accessible for free by local voluntary and community organisations.

Access Funds
Summary: Site of funding news and directories of trusts, lottery and EU funds.
Price: £50 per person per year (for voluntary and community organisations)
Advantages: A new news items are added to the website each week. Has an email alerts service.
Disadvantages: No search tool (other than a ‘search the site’ option). Relatively limited information – there are only 150 trusts covered in that directory. The EU directory is equally sparse, and doesn’t translate the EU jargon. Although most information seems to be updated regularly, there are some bits out of date in the directories (e.g. Awards for All).
Conclusion: No search tool and not much covered in the directories. Has a pretty good news section. However, there are similar funding news services available for free.
Click here to go back to contents

Fit4Funding
Summary: Provide an email and print newsletter on funding sources (10 issues per year). The website has general advice and info about funding and links to the GrantNet funding search service (see separate review of GrantNet)
Price: Newsletter costs from £30 to £50 per year to voluntary and community groups depending on whether you subscrice to the email or hard copy and whether you are a member of Fit4Funding or not. Access to the information on the website is free.
Advantages: The email newsletter covers a lot of information - 71 pages worth in the July/August 08 issue.
Disadvantages: Articles aren’t edited much from the websites they are taken from so are quite long and take longer to read.
Conclusion: Provides news rather than funding search service. Covers a lot of information and is aimed primarily at small to medium sized voluntary and community organisations, but could be made a bit more user-friendly.
Click here to go back to contents

Funderfinder Groups in Need (GIN)
Summary: Funderfinder develops pieces of software to help groups access funding information (Funderfinder worked with SYFAB to develop SIFT), some available for free and some you have to pay for. The software applications they produce are:

• Groups in Need (GIN) – a piece of database search software with information on about 4,500 Trust funders. SYFAB use Groups in Need amongst other resources to do funding searches for groups.
• People in Need (PIN) – similar to GIN but for individual grant-seekers rather than community groups.
• Apply Yourselves – Free software to help you write your grant applications
• Budget Yourselves – Free software to help you put a budget together.

Price: Budget Yourselves and Apply Yourselves are both free to download and use. The cost of a single (or first) site licence for Funderfinder Groups in Need (GIN) is £150 plus VAT. The annual renewal fee is £75 plus VAT.
Advantages: Comprehensive on trusts and lottery. The search mechanism is thorough and results are ranked in ‘best match’ order. Links in with Trustfunding. Provides links to more information on each funder.
Disadvantages: Trusts and lottery only. Takes time to learn how to improve your searches.
Conclusion: One of the best search tools out there. The main limitation of FF GIN is that it focuses on just charitable trust and lottery funding. It is fairly straightforward to get started in doing searches using FF, but it is a bit more complicated to learn the techniques to do better searches. And as searches often produce long and daunting lists of results, this is important. GIN does not try to rewrite a lot of information on each funder; it provides links to further information source - Trustfunding, the funder’s own website, and the Guidestar and Charity Commission entries.
Click here to go back to contents

Funding Information North East (FINE)
Summary: FINE researches funding opportunities for the voluntary and community sector in the north east of England. The information on charitable trusts is accessible via a printed directory or a searchable database. They also provide a funding news bulletin (44 issues per year)
Price: Subscription to the database costs £80 per year for a single site license (rising to £180 for 11-20 site licenses). The email news bulletin costs from £50 per year, and the grants bulletin costs from £15 per year. There are various package options that also include the printed funding directories.
Advantages: The search tool allows users to enter up to three areas of work which helps order results.
Disadvantages: The database has limited information – covering trusts only, and a relatively small number of them (113).
Conclusion: A fairly straightforward resource that is limited in its scale and scope.
Click here to go back to contents

GrantFinder
Summary: A funding search tool with information on more than 4,000 grant and loan programmes including those from government departments, local authorities, charitable trusts and corporate sponsors. As well as grants, they report information on loans, venture capital and advisory programmes. Grantfinder is aimed at public sector bodies and large organisations. They also provide the free GrantNet service (reviewed separately) aimed at smaller organisations.
Price: No set price – a quote is given following a demonstration. At least several hundred pounds per year.
Advantages: The information given on each funder is good, well-researched and clear. Info is updated pretty regularly (twice per month)
Disadvantages: The omission of funders that do not agree that their information should be included creates an incomplete picture of what funding is actually available.
Conclusion: Grantfinder is aimed at local authorities and large organisations, rather than smaller local voluntary and community groups, so it is expensive. It is a good product with well-researched information on funders but has deficiencies in the way the search mechanism works.
Click here to go back to contents

Grants Online
Summary: Provides the Grants4 sites for local authorities (reviewed separately). Grants Online is a subscription based site which includes; news on funding opportunities relevant to the private, public and voluntary sector, a searchable grants database, and grant directories to give an overview of what grants are available.
Price: £175 + VAT for a single user license for one year. Can have a free 7-day trial.
Advantages: News section updated fairly frequently. Covers different sources of funding (trusts, lottery, europe, government). Has information on a reasonable amount of funders (i.e. approx 450 charitable trusts). Weekly Funding Insight newsletter has a reasonable amount of information.
Disadvantages: Produces results in alphabetical order so no function for ranking results in best match. Doesn’t always make clear whether funds are currently open for applications or not. No option for choosing what type of organisation is fundraising. Limited search terms and results only loosely related to the search terms chosen.
Conclusion: Good newsletter. Like many other search tools that cover a range of funding sources, this one is let down by the loose search criteria and by not attempting to rank results by best match.
Click here to go back to contents

ProFunding
Summary: Mainly a funding news service, with new items added several times per week on new grant programmes, lottery and european news. The site also covers some information on future trends in fundraising.
Price: £300 + VAT per year which gives access to 2 users to the full service. The SmallFri service gives fortnightly email bulletins of funding sources. Groups with a turnover of below £50,000 are eligible to pay a reduced subscription rate of £100 + VAT per year.
Advantages: Generally well-written and up-to-date news items. The information is gives is accurate and it does a good job of editing some of the worst jargon into much plainer language. Probably the best source of accessible information around on European funding programmes.
Disadvantages: Only a news tool so no searching for funding on this site.
Conclusion: One of the better services out there, although given that it just provides a funding news service, it is quite expensive to subscribe.
Click here to go back to contents

Trustfunding
Summary: Trustfunding has a searchable database of information on the 4,200 plus charitable trusts included within DSC and CAF grant directories.
Price: £175 +VAT for one user for one year.
Advantages: Good information on each funder – well researched.
Disadvantages: The ‘tree’ system used for entering search terms makes it very long-winded and over-complicated to conduct a search on this site. Covers trusts only. Results are given in alphabetical order with lots of results that do not actually match the search criteria. Information on Trusts don’t seem to be updated that frequently.
Conclusion: Still one of the better services around for the information it offers on each Trust, but let down by the difficult search mechanism which makes it difficult to find the information in the first place. Covers trusts only, so an incomplete funding search.
Click here to go back to contents

Comments and feedback

As I mention earlier in this guide, all the reviews are based on my opinions as someone who deals with funding information all the time. I hope that over time we can build up better guidance of the funding information services out there with your help. Have you used any of these services? What did you think? Any tips and advice to share with other grant-seekers? Or any questions about how to use them and get the best out of them? Please let me have any comments or feedback either by commenting on this post, or by emailing me if you’d prefer your comments to stay private.

Thanks,
Danny