The Instrumentl Standard Plan includes: Calendar View, Advanced Funder Insights, Foundation Discovery, Recipient Profiles, Grant Owner Assignments,Filtering by Past Giving Location, Awards View, and the ability to add external URLs to your Document Library. It also supports 10 projects (vs. the Basic Plan’s 5 projects).

Calendar View: See all your upcoming deadlines from your Tracker in a Calendar to keep your grant prospecting organized

Advanced Funder Insights: Get rich data analysis on a foundation’s giving preferences, including their openness to new grantees and top funding categories

Foundation Discovery: Get intelligently matched to good fit private foundations beyond open opportunities, including those that are invite-only or don't have websites

Recipient Profiles: Reverse search a nonprofit similar to yours to find their funders

Grant Owner Assignments: Assign an “Owner” to a grant to increase collaboration across your team, especially if you have different team members tackling different grant proposals

Filtering by Past Giving: Quickly narrow down your matches to funders who have given to your same location historically.

Awards View: See all of your awards and their statistics in one place on your Tracker, and export these as their own report.

External URLs in the Document Library: Create one space for your team to see all grant resources, even if they live outside of Instrumentl.

Watch this 4-minute video recap - more details are provided below the video.

Have you ever wanted to view your Tracker in a Calendar View? Well now you can!

Our Calendar View showcases all of your upcoming deadlines, including funder deadlines, task deadlines and submission goals, along with future funder deadlines of saved grants up to one year out.

Filter by Specific Criteria

This Calendar View comes with all the core essentials from your Tracker. This means you can filter by project, task deadlines, or submission deadlines to get the most relevant Calendar View for you.

Filter by Project

Want to view all your upcoming deadlines for only one project? No problem! When you select Calendar View from within a project, it will only show deadlines associated with the selected project. When you select Calendar View from your All Projects Tracker, it will show deadlines associated with all of your projects.

Interactive Calendar Events

When you select Calendar View, you can easily access your funding opportunity by clicking directly on the event. This means you won’t have to spend time going back to your Tracker and finding the funding opportunity – it’s all in one place!

See Future Deadlines for Saved Grants Up to One Year Out

The new Calendar View also shows future funder deadlines for saved opportunities up to one year out. This means that future application cycles will appear on your Calendar, allowing you to plan for the future and win more grants.

Instead of having to comb through 990 data yourself, Advanced Funder insights does all the data analysis for you. Now you can easily spot big picture trends about funders to save even more time when prospecting.

Evaluating your new Matches using deeper Insights

Find Advanced Funder Insights when you are going through new matches by navigating to the Funder - 990 report tab:

If the funder is a Private Foundation who has electronically filed their 990s, Instrumentl will be able to generate rich new data analytics on past giving trends.

Scroll down the 990 report tab to see the following new insights:

Evaluate how much a funder gave to New Grantees vs. Repeat Grantees over the years, so you can prioritize which funders should be at the top of your focus list.

Total Giving: See what % of Grantees are first time applicants over the years

See the breakdown of total awards that were given to New vs. Repeat Grantees over time. In the example above, the Ford Foundation gave 11% of awards to New Grantees over the last 3 years.

Hover over each bar to see that 35.64% of awards were given to New Grantees vs 64.36% of awards given to Repeat Grantees in 2019. If we were to find another foundation where the % given to New Grantees was even higher, we may consider prioritizing that opportunity first.

Grant Amounts: compare New grantees vs. Repeat grantees award sizes

Use the Grant Amounts to estimate how much you should ask for as a new applicant. As seen above, New Grantees were awarded a median of $15,000 by the Ford Foundation over the last 3 years.

The breakdown of funding between New vs. Repeat Grantees can also help you assess the ROI of building a relationship with this funder. The Ford Foundation’s median giving amount of $150,000 to Repeat Grantees in 2019 can be used as an indicator of the potential funding from a long term relationship with this funder.

Returning applicants can determine if they should ask current funders for more money next year based on the median grant size to Returning Grantees. In the chart above, Repeat Grantees were awarded a median of $150,000 in 2019.

Want to analyze a funder’s Openness to New Grantees? Upgrade to Standard

Trends in Giving Average and Median Amounts: Spot the big picture trends

When looking at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, their Foundation's giving median has increased over the years - going from $130,000 in 2015 up to $493,000 in 2019.

Past Grantees: Identify exactly which organizations are New grantees vs. Repeat

Now you can browse through all of the individual past grantees in the "All-time" tab. Click on the individual year tabs (i.e 2019, 2018) to see the column "New Grantee?" appear. A check mark under the "New Grantee?" column signifies that organization was a first time applicant.

In the example below, 3 Arts and 3 Legged Dog were both first time applicants (and first time awardees!) of the Ford Foundation in 2019.

You can even use the search bar to parse through the Grant Purpose descriptions. In the example above, searching for "art" pulls up organizations whose grant purposes contain the word "art." Use the columns Amount, Purpose, Location, and New Grantee to see if this funder has funded similar organizations in your area, and how much was awarded.

The Past Grantee list can even give you ideas for organizations you can reach out to for tips or advice on how to build a relationship with the funder. You might even ask them for an introduction!

By using the IRS’ classification codes of nonprofits, spot trends like giving by category to understand what cause areas a funder likes funding most.

In the example below, see how Community Improvement & Capacity Building, along with Education are the Kresge Foundation's two most funded areas of giving.

Dig deeper into subclassifications, such as comparing Economic Development grant amounts to Community Service Clubs grant amounts - see what those subcategories Average and Median Grant amounts are.

Research insights for any Funder ad-hoc in the QuickFind

If you'd like to dig into these insights for any funder, not necessarily one that came up in your Matches, you can also pull them up by looking up any private foundation in Instrumentl's QuickFind in the top left corner:

Look up the funder you are interested in, and click on their 990 Reports result:

Navigate to the Contents on the right hand side, and click on the Insights you want to analyze:

The faster you can identify patterns, the faster you can prioritize the best fit funders and start focusing on building those funder relationships.

Want to see your funders’ top funding categories? Upgrade to Standard

With Foundation Discovery, you can now get intelligently matched to good fit funders that may be invite only or don’t even have a website! Previously on Instrumentl, you were only matched to open Opportunities across foundation, corporate and government sources.

Now Foundation Discovery is helping you surface good fit funders that may not be so visible, but who you may want to start building a relationship with.

Within your Instrumentl Matches, look for the new tab Funder Matches.

Note: This feature is in Beta and will continue to improve over time. If you run into any issues please let us know through the chat bubble!

Relationship building is key to going after any funder. With invite-only funders, however, your funding strategy will rely on relationship building. Foundation Discovery gives you the insights and clues to completing that first outreach by providing you with the funder’s Contact Information, Key People on their Board, and who their Past Grantees are.

If you would rather exclude invite-only funders from your matches, you can filter them out by de-selecting the box “Include invite-only funders.”

Scroll down the Funder page on the right hand side to see their Application Information for instructions on if and how you can apply, their deadline, and where to send applications.

When browsing through your matched Funders, you will have immediate access to this funder’s Advanced Funder Insights, so you can see their Openness to New Grantees, Giving by NTEE Code, Past Grantees, and more - all in one place.

Once you’ve decided whether to pursue this Funder, hit Save or Hide to move this funder out of your Matches.

With everything in one view, now your Instrumentl Matches will show you active opportunities and funders that may not be so visible, while utilizing Advanced Funder Insights to help you more quickly determine the good fit funders for your organization.

Ready to see a comprehensive list of all your top matched funders? Upgrade to Standard

Easily separate Recipient Profiles from Funder Profiles and do a reverse search to find similar nonprofits to yours and see who funded them.

First, look up a nonprofit similar to yours in the QuickFind, in the top left corner of your home screen. From the QuickFind results, click on their 990 report:

To the right of the organization name, toggle down to "View Recipient Profile" and scroll down to Past Awards Received

This represents a list of funders that funded the nonprofit - including the funder's location, how much was awarded, and the purpose of that grant. From this list of new prospects, you can click on any funder name to further research its giving history and potential active opportunities in Instrumentl.

You can assign an “Owner” to a grant. This helps increase collaboration across your team, especially if you have different team members tackling different grant proposals.

To do so, click into an individual grant you’ve saved and then “Select Owner”:

You’ll be able to see who is responsible for the grant directly on your Tracker:

Filter by "Owner" by selecting the down arrow to the right of "NAME":

You now have the ability to filter your matches down to funders that have historically given to your location.

When reviewing the matches for your project, you’ll see both past giving to orgs with my location of project and past giving to orgs with my location of residency as filtering options. Filtering by either location will narrow down your results to funders who have given to at least one of your locations of project/residency in the past.

Learn more about filtering by past giving location here.

See all of your awarded grants in one place on the Tracker, view statistics for awarded grants, and download an Awards Report.

The Tracker’s columns change slightly in the Awards tab, to show you the most vital information for those awarded grants. You’ll also be able to see Award Statistics just above the Tracker. Last but not least, you can export your awarded grants into an Awards Report! Learn more about Awards View here.

Attach external links in your Document Library for records that live outside of Instrumentl. This will save you time, meaning you won't have to download and re-upload files already saved in a URL.

Streamline team collaboration to make Instrumentl's Document Library your one source of truth for grant records.

The Standard Plan will be constantly improving over time - this is just the beginning!

Here's a slide deck with visuals summarizing everything you'd get with the Standard Plan: Standard Plan Slide Deck.

To upgrade to the Standard Plan, log in to Instrumentl and navigate to www.instrumentl.com/pricing.

Questions or feedback on the Standard Plan? Send us a chat when you're logged in, or email us [email protected].