How to choose a grant finding tool for your charity

Any grant finding tool will give you a list. The first thing I check is whether that list has any connection to your charity at all.

So before you look at the results, look at what the tool asked you.

Does it ask about your charity first?

A good tool asks questions before it gives you a single funder. What's the funding for? What will the grant go towards? Where are you based? What's your income?

If it skips all that and goes straight to a list, the list is generic. If the tool doesn't know who you are, the list can't really be about you.

The same goes for a chatbot. Specific in, specific out. Our guide to using AI for grant funding shows you what to write down before you ask.

Where did the list come from?

As a builder, this is the question I'd want answered. Is the list coming from a bot typing "grants for charities 2026" into Google? Or is it tapping into real sources?

A quick web search on its own tends to give you names with no link to your charity. You end up with a lot of dud funders, and you only find out they're duds once you've spent time reading about each one.

Here's where ours comes from:

• 360Giving, where a few hundred UK funders publish the grants they've made. For the funders who publish, it shows who they've actually funded.
• The Charity Commission register. Charities that make grants say so on their register entry. Plenty have no website or published criteria, so the entry is only where the checking starts.
• The funder's own website. A directory can point us at a funder, but the deadline, the income rule and the area all come from the funder's own page.

For one charity, we looked at a long list of funders. Fewer than one in four made the shortlist.

So when you trial a tool, ask it where the list came from, and when each funder was last checked. If it can't tell you, you'll be doing that checking yourself.

What does it say when it doesn't know?

This one matters a lot to me. AI has a habit of filling gaps just to finish the job. It guesses, and it guesses with confidence.

I made our system say "not stated" instead. If a funder's page doesn't give a deadline, an income rule or a grant size, the row says "not stated". It doesn't guess from past grants, and it doesn't borrow a number from somewhere else.

It comes up more than you'd think. In early October 2026, two in three of the funders in our register had no income rule we could find.

The same rule runs through the applications we draft. Every number about the charity in a draft has to trace back to something the charity gave us, or filed with the Charity Commission. If something's missing, we ask them rather than fill it in.

You can't confidently put something untrue on an application. That's what ruins your credibility with a funder, and it would ruin mine too.

So when you trial a tool, look for the blanks. If every funder has a neat answer for every box, ask where those answers came from.

Free or paid: what are you paying for?

A free tool still costs someone money to run. That shapes what it can do.

Checking costs money. Before a funder gets a straight Apply from us, two separate reads of the funder's own page have to agree on every fact the row gives you. If they don't, it's flagged, and the Apply waits until it's settled. The system also uses the background the charity has given us and the funder research we've already recorded.

Ours costs real money every time it runs.

So whatever you're looking at, free or paid, ask one question: who's paying for the checking? If nobody is, you are, in hours.

What to try in a trial

If a charity asked me to sit next to them while they tried out a tool, this is what I'd have them do:

• Tell it about your charity and see what it asks back. Funding purpose, area and income, at the very least.
• Pick one funder from the list and open its own website. Does what's on the page match what the tool told you?
• Ask where each fact came from, and when it was checked.
• Find a blank. Pick a funder whose page doesn't state an income rule and see what the tool says about it.

And if you want one you can trust to do all of this exceptionally well, try ours.