Funder research is one of the most time-intensive tasks in nonprofit development. Building a useful profile for a single foundation — including program priorities, recent grantees, board composition, application requirements, and relationship connections — can take two to three hours of manual research across 990s, foundation websites, news coverage, and databases like Candid. Most small development operations do it sporadically, when a deadline forces it, rather than systematically.
I’ve been using a structured Perplexity space to do this work for clients, and the results are specific enough to merit a detailed description.
The Setup
The work I’m describing involved researching a short list of known funders in greater depth, plus a secondary goal: to surface additional prospects the organization hadn’t considered.
My client was a community organizing nonprofit with a strong geographic focus, maintaining programs in youth development and workforce training, city-specific housing access and economic development, regional safe waterways, and environmental controls. They were in a less populated area, with a wider geographic net. Understanding the capacity of aligned foundations and uncovering possible funders were both strategically important.
Before running any research, I set up a persistent Perplexity space with detailed instructions and uploaded the organization’s mission statement and latest impact report. That context matters. With the organization’s work in the space, Perplexity can assess program fit directly rather than generating generic funder information that I’d then have to evaluate separately.
The template I worked from covered:
- Funder type, strategic focus, and geographic priorities
- Funding cycle, application deadlines, and eligibility requirements
- Alignment with the organization’s specific programs
- Typical grant size and funding history
- Recent grantees (past two years)
- Board composition and leadership
- Existing relationship connections — board members, staff, prior engagement
- Recommended next steps and outreach strategy
That’s a detailed profile. Populating it manually for ten funders is a significant time investment. With the Perplexity space, I used two approaches depending on what each funder required.
Two Methods
- Light scan for a list of prospects: For an initial pass with five to ten funders, I ran parallel research sessions to populate the core fields: program focus, geography, grant size range, application requirements, and recent giving patterns. This works well for quickly assessing which funders on a list warrant deeper research and which don’t fit. The output at this level is useful for prioritization, not for writing an application or making an outreach decision.
- Deep research on priority funders: For funders that passed the initial screen, I conducted more detailed research: board member identification, relationship mapping within the organization’s network, grantee lists from the past two years, and any public signals of strategic direction or priority shifts. Board composition and recent grantee data are technically public available through 990 filings and foundation websites — but pulling them manually is slow. Perplexity surfaces them faster and organizes them into a usable format.
What It Produced
During deep research sessions on priority funders, Perplexity populated roughly 80% of the fields across a detailed template covering program fit, funding history, board composition, and relationship mapping.
- The fields it handled well: program priorities, geographic focus, grant size ranges, application requirements, recent grantees, board composition, and basic relationship connections — when a board member or staff person had a visible public connection to the funder.
- The fields that required more work or verification: specific contact information, historical giving amounts, and anything requiring relationship knowledge that isn’t publicly documented. Some information was missing entirely. Some was outdated — foundation priorities and program officers change, and public records don’t always reflect the current state.
The searches both confirmed some giving patterns we were already aware of and quantified the sizes of some gifts more precisely than we had been able to before. (A $20,000 gift is quite different than a $100,000 gift.) Through board research, we were also able to see what connections the organization’s board and senior leadership team had to people associated with these funders. In one case, a board member knew a senior staffer quite well, but hadn’t thought about the connection.
Everything required verification before it went into the organization’s records or informed an outreach decision. That’s not unique to Perplexity — it applies to Candid and iWave too. It speeds up the research; it doesn’t replace the judgment call about whether the information is current and accurate enough to act on.
What This Means for Small Nonprofits
The practical comparison is to Candid and iWave, which are the standard tools for this work, but can be priced out of reach for many small organizations. Perplexity surfaces public information — 990 filings, foundation websites, news coverage, grant announcements — rather than proprietary wealth-screening data.
But it can give you a detailed picture of what a foundation funds, who’s on their board, and who else they’ve supported recently. For a small development operation without database subscriptions, that’s a real advantage. For a larger operation with Candid access, it can be a useful complement for relationship mapping and board research that database tools don’t handle as well.
Creating that persistent space is where saving time comes in. A one-off Perplexity search produces inconsistent results because the instructions and organizational context aren’t present. The difference isn’t the tool — it’s that the space knows what it’s looking for and how to organize what it finds.
I tested this out in building the space for my client. Running queries against a more general query with information about the nonprofit, their work, and the region produced less specific, more general responses than building a more data-driven space with the mission statement, annual report, etc., and running the queries there.
- A Note on Building Your Own: Setting up a space like this requires an upfront time investment: writing clear research instructions, uploading relevant organizational documents, and testing the output against your template until the results are consistent. It’s not complicated, but it can take a little tuning. For help in building this, the Perplexity help center is a starting point.
What Comes Next
The next post in this series covers donor research — using Perplexity to build individual donor profiles from public records as a lower-cost alternative to paid wealth-screening tools, with an honest account of what it can and can’t surface.
Working with these tools: If you’re interested in building a Perplexity research space for funder prospecting or donor research, I offer short-term project work — typically 5 to 30 hours over a month or two — to help organizations set up and test these workflows, or to run the research directly. I also work with development staff who want to learn the methodology and build it themselves. Feel free to reach out if either sounds like a fit: get in touch.
Funder research is one of the most time-intensive tasks in nonprofit development. Building a useful profile for a single foundation — including program priorities, recent grantees, board composition, application requirements, and relationship connections — can take two to three hours of manual research across 990s, foundation websites, news coverage, and databases like Candid. Most small development operations do it sporadically, when a deadline forces it, rather than systematically.
I’ve been using a structured Perplexity space to do this work for clients, and the results are specific enough to merit a detailed description.
The Setup
The work I’m describing involved researching a short list of known funders in greater depth, plus a secondary goal: to surface additional prospects the organization hadn’t considered.
My client was a community organizing nonprofit with a strong geographic focus, maintaining programs in youth development and workforce training, city-specific housing access and economic development, regional safe waterways, and environmental controls. They were in a less populated area, with a wider geographic net. Understanding the capacity of aligned foundations and uncovering possible funders were both strategically important.
Before running any research, I set up a persistent Perplexity space with detailed instructions and uploaded the organization’s mission statement and latest impact report. That context matters. With the organization’s work in the space, Perplexity can assess program fit directly rather than generating generic funder information that I’d then have to evaluate separately.
The template I worked from covered:
- Funder type, strategic focus, and geographic priorities
- Funding cycle, application deadlines, and eligibility requirements
- Alignment with the organization’s specific programs
- Typical grant size and funding history
- Recent grantees (past two years)
- Board composition and leadership
- Existing relationship connections — board members, staff, prior engagement
- Recommended next steps and outreach strategy
That’s a detailed profile. Populating it manually for ten funders is a significant time investment. With the Perplexity space, I used two approaches depending on what each funder required.
Two Methods
- Light scan for a list of prospects: For an initial pass with five to ten funders, I ran parallel research sessions to populate the core fields: program focus, geography, grant size range, application requirements, and recent giving patterns. This works well for quickly assessing which funders on a list warrant deeper research and which don’t fit. The output at this level is useful for prioritization, not for writing an application or making an outreach decision.
- Deep research on priority funders: For funders that passed the initial screen, I conducted more detailed research: board member identification, relationship mapping within the organization’s network, grantee lists from the past two years, and any public signals of strategic direction or priority shifts. Board composition and recent grantee data are technically public available through 990 filings and foundation websites — but pulling them manually is slow. Perplexity surfaces them faster and organizes them into a usable format.
What It Produced
During deep research sessions on priority funders, Perplexity populated roughly 80% of the fields across a detailed template covering program fit, funding history, board composition, and relationship mapping.
- The fields it handled well: program priorities, geographic focus, grant size ranges, application requirements, recent grantees, board composition, and basic relationship connections — when a board member or staff person had a visible public connection to the funder.
- The fields that required more work or verification: specific contact information, historical giving amounts, and anything requiring relationship knowledge that isn’t publicly documented. Some information was missing entirely. Some was outdated — foundation priorities and program officers change, and public records don’t always reflect the current state.
The searches both confirmed some giving patterns we were already aware of and quantified the sizes of some gifts more precisely than we had been able to before. (A $20,000 gift is quite different than a $100,000 gift.) Through board research, we were also able to see what connections the organization’s board and senior leadership team had to people associated with these funders. In one case, a board member knew a senior staffer quite well, but hadn’t thought about the connection.
Everything required verification before it went into the organization’s records or informed an outreach decision. That’s not unique to Perplexity — it applies to Candid and iWave too. It speeds up the research; it doesn’t replace the judgment call about whether the information is current and accurate enough to act on.
What This Means for Small Nonprofits
The practical comparison is to Candid and iWave, which are the standard tools for this work, but can be priced out of reach for many small organizations. Perplexity surfaces public information — 990 filings, foundation websites, news coverage, grant announcements — rather than proprietary wealth-screening data.
But it can give you a detailed picture of what a foundation funds, who’s on their board, and who else they’ve supported recently. For a small development operation without database subscriptions, that’s a real advantage. For a larger operation with Candid access, it can be a useful complement for relationship mapping and board research that database tools don’t handle as well.
Creating that persistent space is where saving time comes in. A one-off Perplexity search produces inconsistent results because the instructions and organizational context aren’t present. The difference isn’t the tool — it’s that the space knows what it’s looking for and how to organize what it finds.
I tested this out in building the space for my client. Running queries against a more general query with information about the nonprofit, their work, and the region produced less specific, more general responses than building a more data-driven space with the mission statement, annual report, etc., and running the queries there.
- A Note on Building Your Own: Setting up a space like this requires an upfront time investment: writing clear research instructions, uploading relevant organizational documents, and testing the output against your template until the results are consistent. It’s not complicated, but it can take a little tuning. For help in building this, the Perplexity help center is a starting point.
What Comes Next
The next post in this series covers donor research — using Perplexity to build individual donor profiles from public records as a lower-cost alternative to paid wealth-screening tools, with an honest account of what it can and can’t surface.
Working with these tools: If you’re interested in building a Perplexity research space for funder prospecting or donor research, I offer short-term project work — typically 5 to 30 hours over a month or two — to help organizations set up and test these workflows, or to run the research directly. I also work with development staff who want to learn the methodology and build it themselves. Feel free to reach out if either sounds like a fit: get in touch.