A prospect research colleague at a nearby university contacted us at HBG to learn more about researching trusts and foundations around the world. I thought you might like to see the resources we suggested for her.
The always-wonderful Foundation Center in the United States has created a reference page chock-full of free and fee books, guides, websites, databases and more to help you locate information on grant-making organizations worldwide. Check out the page at http://foundationcenter.org/getstarted/topical/international.html which includes country-specific resources. Of course, the Foundation Center has their own trusted Foundation Directory Online for US-based foundation searching.
England-based fundraising consultancy Chapel & York has created a free searchable database called GrantMakers Online. New trusts and foundations are added daily directly by the foundations themselves. Visit http://www.grantmakersonline.com/to have a look.
The Directory of Social Change in London is another long-trusted resource used by researchers and front-line fundraisers alike for information, guides and advice on every aspect of fundraising. Their online resource guides include Trustfunding.org.uk, companygiving.org.uk and governmentfunding.org.uk. Visit their main site at http://www.dsc.org.uk/Home.
And before we leave the UK, we can’t miss GuidestarUK at http://guidestar.org.uk/. Sister site of the very useful Guidestar.org in the US, GuidestarUK provides both free and fee-based access to their database of over 162,000 nonprofit organizations (including grant-making trusts) in England and Wales. Also in the Guidestar family are Guidestar Israel (http://www.guidestar.org.il/), Guidestar India (http://www.guidestarindia.org), and Philanthropy.be (http://www.philanthropy.be), available only in French or Dutch.
The European Foundation Centre in Brussels maintains a vast storehouse of knowledge about foundations in continental Europe and the UK. Visit http://www.efc.be to see their list of members and explore the resource library with white papers, web links, books and more on philanthropic giving trends and information related to foundations in Europe.
Imagine Canada maintains an online searchable database of trusts, foundations, companies and government sources of funding from across Canada and the US. The fee-based directory has information on over 10,000 funders. Visit the Canadian Director of Foundations and Corporations site at http://www.imaginecanada.ca/directory
Also in Canada, FoundationSearch provides fee-based databases highlighting foundation and company funders located in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. Visit their website at http://www.foundationsearch.com to take a tour of their searchable resources.
I hope this tour of global sources for grant-making foundations was helpful – please feel free to suggest more!
UPDATE!: From research colleague Liz Rejman who suggested two more Canadian fee-based services. Thanks, Liz!:
CharityCan: http://www.charitycan.ca
Ajah Fundtracker: http://ajah.ca
