FundLens: AI-Powered Grant Prospecting
Helping nonprofits find and connect with aligned foundations using AI scoring and automated outreach
The Challenge
Nonprofits spend enormous amounts of time prospecting for grant funding. The process of finding aligned foundations is manual, fragmented, and inefficient:
- •Hours spent manually researching foundations on GuideStar and reading through 990 filings
- •No systematic way to score how well a foundation's priorities align with the nonprofit's mission
- •Outreach emails are generic and don't reference specific foundation interests or giving patterns
- •No pipeline tracking to manage relationships across dozens of potential funders
Our first client, the White Lens Foundation focused on child online safety, was spending weeks on research that could be dramatically accelerated with the right tooling.
The Solution
We built FundLens—a platform that loads IRS foundation data, filters by criteria, uses AI to score mission alignment against the nonprofit's pillars, and generates personalized outreach emails with full pipeline tracking.
Key Features
IRS Data Filtering
Search and filter 10,000+ foundations by assets, grant size, state, organization type, and NTEE category to find relevant prospects fast.
AI Alignment Scoring
Claude AI scores each foundation against the nonprofit's mission pillars, providing a 0-100 score with detailed reasoning for why they're a good fit.
ProPublica 990 Enrichment
Automatically pulls financial data, grant history, and filing details from ProPublica's 990 database to enrich foundation profiles.
Personalized Outreach Emails
AI generates personalized email sequences that reference specific foundation interests, giving patterns, and grant recipients.
Kanban Pipeline
Track outreach progress with a 7-step sequence from initial contact through follow-ups, keeping all foundation relationships organized.
Contact Extraction from PDFs
Uses Claude Vision to extract contact information from 990 PDF filings, finding key people to reach out to directly.
How It Works
Load & filter foundations: IRS e-file data is loaded and filtered by assets, grant size, location, and NTEE category to surface relevant prospects from 10,000+ foundations.
AI scores alignment: Claude analyzes each foundation's giving history, grant recipients, and stated mission against the nonprofit's pillars, producing a score and detailed explanation.
Enrich with 990 data: ProPublica integration pulls financial details, filing history, and grant activity to build complete foundation profiles.
Generate & track outreach: AI crafts personalized emails referencing specific foundation interests, and a Kanban pipeline tracks the full 7-step outreach sequence.
The Results
FundLens transformed the grant prospecting workflow for the White Lens Foundation:
- ✓Foundation research that took weeks now takes hours with smart filtering and AI scoring
- ✓Every outreach email is personalized with specific references to the foundation's giving history
- ✓AI explains exactly why each foundation is a good fit, with per-pillar score breakdowns
- ✓Full pipeline tracking ensures no opportunity falls through the cracks
Technical Implementation
Technical Implementation
Architecture
Frontend
- • Next.js 14 App Router with TypeScript
- • shadcn/ui components (Radix UI + Tailwind)
- • Responsive dashboard with filter sidebar
- • Foundation detail pages with score visualizations
Backend
- • FastAPI (Python) for API endpoints
- • SQLite for development, PostgreSQL for production
- • Claude API for mission alignment scoring
- • Claude Vision for PDF contact extraction
- • Deployed on Railway.app
Data Pipeline
- • IRS 990-PF e-file data via Giving Tuesday Data Lake
- • ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer API for 990 enrichment
- • Automated grant history extraction from XML filings
- • Contact search across multiple public sources
Key Design Decisions
- • Per-pillar scoring: AI scores against each mission pillar independently for transparent alignment reasoning
- • Risk flags: Automatically surfaces concerns like small foundation size or missing grant data
- • 7-step outreach: Structured email sequence with AI-generated personalization at each step
- • Bookmark lists: Organize foundations into custom lists for different campaigns or priorities
Need AI to streamline your workflows?
Whether it's data processing, outreach automation, or intelligent scoring—we build custom AI tools that save your team hours every week.
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