Method and boundaries
Research the funder before the funder consumes the calendar.
Funder Pursuit Advisor helps a nonprofit decide whether one foundation deserves research, cultivation, relationship-building, and proposal time. Its most valuable output may be a defensible refusal.
The decision
The tool returns one of four states: decline, park, pursue, or needs human check. It does not average the evidence into a fit score. An explicit geographic or legal mismatch stays decisive even when several mission keywords match.
Decline and park results name the condition that would justify reopening the prospect. Pursue authorizes only a bounded next research step within the staff-time estimate supplied by the user.
Sources
The research starts with the foundation’s own website, then checks public tax filings, recent grant records, grantee announcements, and credible public reporting. Every retained claim appears in an evidence ledger with a direct source link, source owner, date or tax period when available, evidence type, confidence, and short supporting text.
Kindora supplies structured foundation identity, 990 summaries, itemized grant records, giving statistics, and exact-foundation open-program matches. The tool credits Kindora and labels its records as provider-derived unless Kindora supplies an underlying filing or foundation link. Those records can clarify giving patterns, but cannot independently force a decline or prove a warm relationship.
The filing lookup uses the public ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API, which republishes IRS annual extracts. Filing data can lag current strategy. The result shows the tax periods reviewed and never treats missing filing data as zero.
What remains uncertain
A foundation can publish broad priorities while making grants through established relationships. Grant descriptions can be vague. Related legal entities may share a public brand. Search results and provider records can be incomplete. A person must verify the entity, inspect decisive sources, and add private relationship facts the public record cannot show.
Absence from the filings reviewed means no observed match in those records. It does not prove that the foundation rejected similar work.
Data and AI
The server does not maintain user accounts or a database. A nonprofit profile is stored only in the user’s browser when the user selects that option, and it can be cleared from the form. Research requests use a server-side OpenAI credential with response storage disabled.
External pages and user text are treated as untrusted data. The service screens for attempts to control the model, validates the structured research response, and withholds claims whose source URL was not returned by the research tools.
Human boundary
The advisor does not contact foundation staff, infer a private relationship, draft outreach, write or submit proposals, predict a win, define the nonprofit’s strategy, or certify that a public claim remains current. Those decisions stay with nonprofit leadership.
If the team already has a live opportunity with published guidelines, use the companion Grant Fit Auditor to test that specific call.
Author
Developed by Wayan Vota. The product is a working argument for nonprofit leaders: prospect research is an investment decision, and a source-backed no can save more than an AI-assisted proposal.