List of Interesting Funding Opportunities for Our Projects

From Resource Generation: http://www.resourcegeneration.org/component/content/article?id=47

Affinity groups are networks of funders that have a common interest. If you contact the administrator of the affinity group they may be able to put you in touch with issue-specific fundraising resources. See the Council on Foundation’s website to find a large list of affinity groups affiliated with the Council on Foundations.

Association of Small Foundations is a network of donors, trustees, employees and consultants of foundations with few or no staff. ASF does not provide direct contact information of their members but are a great resource for data about funding and grantmaking from the foundation perspective (www.smallfoundations.org).

Community Foundations exist across the country which provide resources to specific geographic areas. The Community Foundation locator has an interactive map to help you locate a community foundation in your geographic area (http://www.cof.org/whoweserve/community/resources/index.cfm?navItemNumber=15626).

The Foundation Center has a lot of resources including foundation and grants directories, available online and in libraries across the country (http://www.fdncenter.org).

Guidestar is a national database of nonprofit organizations and provides information about the operations and finances of foundations (http://www.guidestar.org).

Grantmakers Without Borders is a network of trustees and staff of public and private foundations as well as individual donors who practice global social change philanthropy. Their website has a listing of foundations and other organizations interested in international grantmaking (http://www.gwob.net/advicegs/index.htm).

Kim Klein has written a number of books about fundraising for grassroots organizations, available from the publisher Jossey Bass (http://www.josseybass.com) and publishes the Grassroots Fundraising Journal (http://www.grassrootsfundraising.org).

Regional Associations of Grantmakers are organizations for grantmakers (and sometimes for nonprofits too) in geographic regions. Contact them to find out about funding resources in your area (http://www.givingforum.org).

Resist has a great fundraising resource guide on their website (http://www.resistinc.org), Finding Funding: A Beginner’s Guide to Foundation Research, 5th Edition.

Another great resource is Idealist.org, a project of Action Without Borders(http://www.idealist.org/about/about.html). On this site you will find over 45,000 nonprofit and community organizations in 165 countries, which many progressive individual donors use to research their giving areas, searching or browsing by name, location or mission. If your organization is not yet listed here, you can add it now-it’s free! (http://www.idealist.org/ip/idealist/Org/New/default

In the last years, there have been a rise of online tools for fundraising, sometimes called crowdsourced fundraising platforms. These tools include Causes, Crowdrise, Razoo, DonorsChoose, First Giving, Jumo, Kickstarter and many more.