Donor and grant research for the development director of one. For less than what nonprofits pay for one month of wealth screening.
Get Your Report — $485DonorSearch, iWave, WealthEngine, Kindsight, GivingDNA. $200 to $15,000+ per month. Built for universities and hospitals. Sold to small nonprofits anyway.
If you run development at a nonprofit under $5M in revenue, every tool built to help you costs more than the money you'd raise with it.
Meanwhile, every private foundation in America files a public tax return listing exactly who it gave money to last year. The IRS publishes it. Ninety percent of those foundations have no website. The 990-PF is the only place their giving shows up.
Nobody built a tool that reads those filings for a nonprofit that can't afford to hire three people to do it. So we did.
| Deliverable | Stated Value |
|---|---|
| 15 ranked funder prospects mined from current 990-PF filings | $1,500 |
| Full intelligence briefing on each funder: giving history, grant sizes, board composition, grantee patterns | $2,000 |
| Trustee and principal donor identification (the individuals behind the foundations, your major-gift prospects) | $1,200 |
| 10 personalized outreach emails, ready to send | $750 |
| Warm introduction map: who in your network already knows someone on theirs | $500 |
| Grant fit score and funder-mission match ranking | $400 |
| PDF and Word deliverables your board can read | included |
| Total stated value | $6,350 |
| Your price | $485, one time, no contract |
▸ See the final document result from a synthesized nonprofit.
| Your Options | Cost | What You Still Do Yourself |
|---|---|---|
| ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer | Free | Read the filings, rank the funders, find the trustees, write every email |
| Candid search, free tier | $0, one full profile view per month | Everything, one funder at a time |
| Candid Premium | $1,199 a year billed annually, or $219 a month | Search, screen, qualify, write |
| Candid Ultimate | $1,699 a year billed annually | The same work, plus compliance reports |
| Candid at a partner location | Free, in person | The same work, from a library computer |
| Instrumentl Discover | $299 a month billed annually, $3,588 a year | Review the matches, qualify, write |
| Freelance grant researcher | $40 to $150 an hour, or $500 to $2,500 for a research report | Scope the project, brief it, wait for it |
| iWave by Kindsight | $4,500 to $5,800 a year, Premium by quote | Learn the dashboard, run the screens, write the emails |
| DonorSearch | No published price, quote only | Book the demo, negotiate, then do the work |
| WealthEngine (Altrata) | No published price, quote only | Book the demo, negotiate, then do the work |
| True Prospects | $485, one time | Read the report. Send the emails. |
Every tool on this list sells you access to data. True Prospects sends you the finished work.
Pricing verified August 30, 2026 against published vendor pages: Candid, Kindsight, Instrumentl. DonorSearch and WealthEngine publish no rates. Plans vary by seats, data volume, and integrations.
For 22 years I investigated stories nobody wanted found. Thirteen Emmy Awards, three Murrow Awards, Public Affairs Manager at the FBI for Colorado and Wyoming.
A few years ago I co-founded a nonprofit. Finding donors was harder than the mission itself.
The IRS publishes 990-PFs. AI can read them. Why isn't anyone doing this for small nonprofits?
Now I do the same thing for nonprofit grants that I used to do for investigative stories. I find what's hidden in plain sight.
Your report must surface at least one prospect you'd never found on your own, with a source citation proving it. Otherwise we refund every dollar.