Finding the right grant is the first — and often hardest — step in grant seeking. Great Grants was built to remove the guesswork: instead of wrestling with keyword codes and filter menus, you describe what you’re looking for in plain language, and the platform matches opportunities to your organization. But like any smart search, the quality of what comes back depends on what the platform knows about you and how you ask. This guide covers both.

How search works in Great Grants

Click Search in the left navigation (or go to app.greatgrants.ai/search) and describe what you’re looking for the way you’d explain it to a colleague. There are no special operators or required keywords. Real examples that work well:

• “youth mentoring grants under $50k”
• “rural broadband infrastructure”
• “food security programs for seniors”

Behind the scenes, Great Grants combines what you typed with what it knows about your organization — your mission, focus areas, headquarters location, and sectors from your Organization Profile — and returns opportunities your organization is actually positioned to win. Each result includes an AI relevance indication so you can prioritize at a glance.

This is a fundamentally different model from traditional grant databases, where you check boxes and hope your categories match the funder’s. In Great Grants, your search phrase describes the work, and your profile describes the organization. The two together produce the match.

Rule #1: Complete your Program first

If you take one thing from this article, make it this: search relevance depends heavily on your Programs. When your program record is thin, the platform has little to go on, and results will feel generic. When it’s complete, results reflect grants that fit your mission, your geography, and your sector — not just your search words.

The program fields with the biggest impact on search relevance are:

1. Program Title — tells the platform what your organization exists to do.
2. Program Description — highlights your primary and secondary sectors, which anchor results to your field of work.
3. Geographic Focus Area — many grants are geographically restricted; your geographic focus lets the platform weigh place-based opportunities correctly.
4. People Served — the key characteristics of the populations you serve

If your results don’t feel relevant, this is almost always the fix: open your Porgram, fill in the information above and run the search again.

Rule #2: Be specific about the work, not the funding

Vague searches produce vague results — on any platform. The same principle grant professionals apply on Grants.gov applies here: search for the program you run, not the type of money you want.

Less effective: “faith-based grants,” “nonprofit funding,” “grants for my organization.”

More effective: “homeless shelter operating support,” “youth violence prevention programs,” “reentry services for formerly incarcerated adults,” “after-school tutoring in rural communities.”

The second set works better because funders organize their giving around problems and populations, not around applicant identity. Describe who you serve, what you do for them, and — if it matters to you — the size of award you’re looking for.

Rule #3: Search like you’d describe the program to a colleague

Because Great Grants understands natural language, complete thoughts outperform keyword fragments. Include any of these details when they matter to you:

• Population served: “seniors,” “veterans,” “foster youth”
• Activity: “job training,” “meal delivery,” “mentoring”
• Geography: “in Texas,” “rural communities”
• Award size: “under $50k,” “small grants”

You don’t need all of them in every search — but each one you add narrows results toward what you can actually use.

Rule #4: Run multiple searches from different angles

A single search rarely surfaces everything. Funders describe the same work in different vocabularies: one foundation funds “food insecurity,” another funds “hunger relief,” a federal program funds “nutrition assistance.” Run a few variations:

• Search by program type (“community food pantry operating costs”)
• Search by outcome (“reducing food insecurity among families”)
• Search by population (“nutrition programs for low-income seniors”)

Each pass can surface opportunities the others missed. Because searching is fast, three or four angles takes only a few minutes.

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Rule #5: Setting a Search Alert

A search alert lets the platform do the searching for you. Once you've set up a search with the criteria that matter to your organization—like grant type, funding amount, location, or focus area—you can save it as an alert instead of running it manually every day. From then on, the platform keeps an eye on new and updated opportunities that match what you're looking for, and emails you when something relevant comes up.

To set one up, run a search using your preferred filters, then click Save as Alert (or the bell icon) and give your alert a name you'll recognize later. You can choose how often you'd like to hear from us—for example, daily or weekly—and even opt to receive a note when there are no new matches, so you always know the search is still working. Setting a search alert means you'll never have to worry about missing a new funding opportunity, and you can manage or turn off any alert at any time from your account settings.

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What to do with your results

From the results list, you can take three actions on any grant:

1. Open it to see full details — eligibility requirements, application deadline, funding amount, funder, and the full description. Always read eligibility before investing time.
2. Save it if it looks promising but you’re not ready to apply. Saved grants are kept with your organization, so teammates can see them too, and your Saved Grants page also shows recently viewed grants so you can pick up where you left off.
3. Start an application directly from the grant when you’re ready — Great Grants will read the grant’s official documents and pre-fill a draft using your profile and programs.

Use the AI relevance indication to triage: review high-relevance results first, and skim the rest for surprises.

A simple triage habit

Grant professionals recommend deciding quickly and moving on. For each result, ask three questions:

1. Are we eligible? Check the eligibility section first. If you’re not eligible, no amount of good writing will fix it.
2. Does the deadline work? If the deadline is days away and the application is substantial, be honest about whether you can submit quality work in time.
3. Does the award size justify the effort? A $5,000 award with a 20-page application may not be the best use of your team’s hours.

If a grant passes all three, save it or start the application. If it fails one, move on without guilt — the next search is seconds away.

Troubleshooting: “My results don’t feel relevant”

Work through this checklist in order:

1. Check your Program completion. Mission, focus areas and geographic focus areas matter most. Fill them in and search again.
2. Rewrite the search as a sentence. Replace “grants” with a description of the program: who it serves, what it does, where it operates.
3. Try a different vocabulary. Swap your term for how a funder might phrase it (“food pantry” → “food security” → “hunger relief”).
4. Broaden, then narrow. If a very specific search returns little, drop one qualifier (like award size) and re-run it.

If results still miss the mark after these steps, that’s useful feedback for our team — reach out to your Great Grants account contact.

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