Find grants for your charity.

What this tool actually does

Every charity registered with the Charity Commission for England and Wales has to say, in public, what it exists to do, who it helps, where it works and roughly how much money it has. That information already sits on the Commission’s register — most charities just never think to use it for anything beyond their own annual return. This tool does one simple thing with it: it reads your charity’s own register entry, then compares it against a database of active UK grant-making trusts, foundations and funds, and shows you which ones look like a genuine fit. You type a name. Everything else — the purposes, the beneficiaries, the area, the income band — comes from the public record, not from a form.

The result is a plain list, in plain English: who might fund you, why we think so, and what you’d typically expect to be asked for. Nothing is hidden behind a login and nothing is held back for a later step — every matched funder is shown, free, the first time you search. If you want us to keep watching for new funders as they start giving, that’s a free account; the search itself never requires one.

How the matching works — and what it can’t do

We built the matching in four honest steps, each one a real check rather than a guess:

1. Capacity and openness. A funder only appears if it is currently active, gives a meaningful amount to organisations each year, and is genuinely open to applications — closed trusts, funders that only support individuals, and bodies that exist purely to fundraise for one cause (rather than to give grants) are filtered out before matching even starts.
2. Geography.A funder that only gives locally has to actually cover your local authority or region — we never treat “England” on its own as a meaningful geographic match, because it tells you nothing about whether a funder has ever given near you.
3. Cause.We look for at least two independent signals that a funder’s interests overlap with your charity’s purposes — the Commission’s own classification of what you do and who you help, and a comparison of your charitable objects against the funder’s own stated aims and, where a funder publishes its grants, the causes it has actually funded.
4. Track record. Where a funder openly publishes its past grants, we use that real giving history — who they funded, how much, and how recently — as the strongest signal of all. A funder that has recently given to charities like yours, at a size like yours, is a better bet than one that merely says it might.

Every match is labelled honestly with how strong we think it is — Strong, Good or Possible — check carefully— and every card explains, in plain words, why it appears. We never pad a list to make it look bigger, and a typical award figure is only ever shown where we hold real, published grants data to calculate it from — never guessed. This is a starting point for your own research, not a promise of funding: always check a funder’s own website or register entry before you apply, because deadlines, contact details and priorities can change between our weekly updates.

Where the data comes from

We don’t hold anything back about our sources, because trusting the data means being able to check it yourself. Your charity’s details come from the Charity Commission for England and Wales register, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Funder profiles and giving patterns are compiled from 360Giving and UK Grantmaking, both used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. We refresh all of it weekly, filter and match it ourselves, and compute figures such as typical award size from the underlying published grants — in other words, this data has been modified and derived from the original sources, not republished unchanged. Full detail on how we build and check it, including where the coverage falls short, is on our about the data page.

One honest limit worth stating plainly: our charity register covers England and Wales only. If your charity is registered with the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) or the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland, we don’t yet hold your register entry, so the lookup won’t find you — that coverage is on our roadmap, not something we’ll pretend to have today.

Who this is for

This tool is built for trustees, treasurers and staff at small and medium UK charities — the people who have to find funding alongside everything else on their plate, without a professional fundraiser or a subscription to a paid grants database. It is equally useful whether you have never applied for a grant before or you fundraise every year and want a faster way to spot funders you might have missed. It works best once your charity has a settled sense of its purposes and area of work, because that is exactly what the matching reads from the register.

What to do with your results

A long list of possible funders is a start, not a finish. Most charities do best applying to a short, well-chosen handful rather than working through everyone on the list — our guide on choosing which funders to approach walks through how to narrow it down. Once you’ve picked your shortlist, our guide to writing your first grant application covers what funders actually look for and how to put a budget together honestly. And because applying for a grant is a decision for your whole board, not just whoever spotted the opportunity, our guide on what your board needs to minute sets out what to check and record before you send anything off.