Grant Writer
A practical path from project to proposal.
The steps below describe a complete Grant Writer journey. You can also enter from Funding Explorer when you already have an opportunity or funder in mind.
- 01
Start with your nonprofit
Aiyan begins with an organization profile because the same nonprofit information appears across funding research and grant applications. You can identify the organization with its name, website, or EIN, then review the public facts Aiyan finds.
Confirm the details that belong in your work. The profile becomes reusable context for later projects and applications.
- 02
Describe the program or project
Capture the work you want to fund: the need, community, activities, outcomes, requested amount, and timeline. A working title is enough to begin, and you can strengthen the project as more details become available.
Projects are reusable. One project can support research into several funders, while each selected funding target receives its own application workspace.
- 03
Explore and evaluate funding
Funding Explorer searches current federal opportunities, foundation records, and nonprofit funding history. Grant Writer can also compare potential funders against the project you have described.
Review the source, the evidence of fit, and the questions that still need confirmation. This gives you a practical basis for deciding which opportunity or funder deserves deeper work.
- 04
Build a target-specific application
Choose a funding target to bring the nonprofit profile, project, and relevant funder information into one application workspace. Aiyan uses that shared context to prepare an editable proposal draft.
Each application remains tied to one project and one funding target, so the proposal can reflect the priorities and requirements of that specific funder.
- 05
Review, refine, and prepare to submit
Read the proposal as a working document. Complete open details, check the facts and sources, refine the language, and make sure the application represents your organization accurately.
When the application is ready, use the funder's submission process to send it.
Conversation and Editor
Two views of the same workspace.
Conversation is useful for discovery and guidance. Editor is useful for reviewing and changing structured information directly. A change made in either view belongs to the same organization, project, or application.
Use Conversation to
- Work through questions about your nonprofit and project.
- Research opportunities and potential funders.
- Understand the evidence behind a suggested match.
- Develop and strengthen the application.
Use Editor to
- Review the organization profile and project details.
- Make precise changes to individual fields.
- Read and edit the proposal as a document.
- See open details that still need attention.
Funding Explorer
Find opportunities and understand funder history.
Funding Explorer brings current federal opportunities, foundation records, and nonprofit funding history into one search experience. Each source helps answer a different part of the funding question.
Current opportunities
Federal notices identify opportunities accepting applications and provide their stated requirements, deadlines, and program details. They answer the immediate question: what can your organization apply for now?
Foundation funding history
Past giving shows which organizations and projects a foundation has supported. It helps you understand patterns, interests, geography, and possible alignment with your work.
Treat funding history as evidence of alignment. Treat a current notice as an opportunity with active requirements. Aiyan keeps the source attached so you can evaluate each finding in context.
Ask Aiyan
Ask questions as the work develops.
Ask Aiyan can draw on your nonprofit profile, projects, applications, and the same funding records available through Funding Explorer. This makes it useful for understanding research and deciding what to examine next.
Questions you might ask
- What makes this funder a plausible match for our project?
- What parts of this opportunity should we examine more closely?
- Which details in our project would strengthen this application?
- What open questions should we resolve before reviewing the proposal?
Before submission
Review the application as your organization's work.
The proposal is a starting point for review and refinement. Read it for accuracy, fit, completeness, and voice before preparing the final submission.
- The organization and project details are current.
- The funding target and application requirements match your plan.
- Source-backed facts, assumptions, and open questions have been reviewed.
- The proposal reflects your nonprofit's voice and the funder's priorities.
- The final submission materials are complete for the funder's process.
Where this data comes from
The sources behind every record Aiyan shows you.
Aiyan reads public registers and published datasets through Grant Atlas. Each source below carries its own terms, the date we established them, and where we read them.
Attribution
Illinois Catalog of State Financial Assistance, NCCS BMF Lookup Tables, Ohio Grants Partnership funding opportunities, Washington FundHubWA funding opportunities require attribution wherever their content appears.
Contains information from the NCCS BMF Lookup Tables, published by the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) at the Urban Institute, which is made available under the ODC Attribution License.
Requested citations
These publishers ask to be cited a particular way. They do not require it, and we include their preferred wording here.
California State Library, California Grants Portal Data, [date/month/year of data referenced], available at https://data.ca.gov/dataset/california-grants-portal.
Terms not yet established
We have not established the terms for Illinois Catalog of State Financial Assistance, Ohio Grants Partnership funding opportunities, Washington FundHubWA funding opportunities. Until we have, treat what they contribute as unlicensed rather than free to reuse.
California Grants Portal
State grant opportunities: the record, its deadline and who may apply.
Public domain by the publisher's own declaration on data.ca.gov: the package carries license_id other-pd and isopen true. You owe no credit. The publisher does ask to be cited in a particular form, which is in citationRequested — honour it on a credits page if you keep one, but nothing turns on it.
Published by California State Library, via data.ca.gov · terms read 2026-09-05
Grants.gov federal opportunity extract
Federal funding opportunities: the record, its deadline and who may apply.
US federal public domain. 17 USC 105 puts the work outside copyright, and the OPEN Government Data Act requires publication with no restrictions 'commercial or non-commercial'. You owe no credit.
Published by US Department of Health and Human Services, for the federal grantmaking agencies · terms read 2026-08-04
Illinois Catalog of State Financial Assistance
State grant opportunities: the record, its deadline and who may apply.
Nobody has established this position, because Illinois does not state one. The portal publishes no terms of use and the statewide notice is silent on reuse. Ask before republishing these records. Do not read this as permission: it is the absence of a statement, not a statement of absence of conditions.
Published by Illinois Governor's Office of Management and Budget · terms read 2026-09-10
IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File
The register of currently-exempt organisations: legal name, filing address, subsection, NTEE code and filing history.
US federal public domain. 26 USC 6104 compels machine-readable publication, and there is no licence, no commercial-use restriction and no copyright hook. You may restructure, enrich and resell it, and you owe no credit for doing so.
Published by Internal Revenue Service · terms read 2026-08-04
IRS Form 990 and 990-PF e-file XML
Grants already paid, read off filed returns, and the funder register built from them.
US federal public domain. 26 USC 6104 compels machine-readable publication, and there is no licence, no commercial-use restriction and no copyright hook. You may restructure, enrich and resell it, and you owe no credit for doing so.
Published by Internal Revenue Service · terms read 2026-08-04
NCCS BMF Lookup Tables
The words for an NTEE code — the short label, the definition paragraph and the NAICS mapping. The codes themselves are IRS values and are not from here.
Licensed ODC-BY 1.0. Show the notice wherever you show an NTEE label, a definition or the NAICS mapping, or link a page carrying it (§4.3). Do not set an NCCS or Urban Institute logo beside the credit — their terms §3.7 reserves the marks — and do not add a copyright symbol, which would misstate what is licensed. Conveying the label SET rather than per-record labels is the stricter §4.2 case and is a separate question.
Published by National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) at the Urban Institute · ODC-BY 1.0 · terms read 2026-09-05
Ohio Grants Partnership funding opportunities
State grant opportunities: the record, its deadline and who may apply.
Nobody has established this position, because Ohio publishes none for this portal. The statewide notice explicitly does not govern it, and the portal's own policy page renders empty. Ask before republishing these records.
Published by Ohio Office of Budget and Management · terms read 2026-09-10
Organisation first-party web pages
What an organisation says about itself — programmes, service area and audience — read off pages it published, and served as a built profile.
Not a licensed dataset. These are facts extracted from pages an organisation published on a domain its own IRS filing named, under the three tests in ADR-018: the domain is first-party for that EIN, what is stored is structured fields rather than prose, and every fact carries the URL and the date it was read. No licence attaches, and no credit is owed to a third party; the page's own URL travels with the fact so a reader can go to the source.
Published by Each organisation, on a domain its own IRS filing named · terms read 2026-08-22
Washington FundHubWA funding opportunities
State grant opportunities: the record, its deadline and who may apply.
Nobody has established this position, and unlike Illinois and Ohio this is not silence. The publisher asserts a copyright on the portal and its Conditions of Use prohibit exploiting information for commercial purposes; whether that clause reaches republishing the records, as against posting to the site, is unresolved. Do not republish these records without a ruling.
Published by Washington State Department of Commerce · terms read 2026-09-10