The Funder File: How to Research a Funder as a Person, Not a Logo
How to research a funder as a person, not an institution: map the programs or portfolio team background, interests and network to build real relationships.
To research a funder well, look past the institution and study the people who will shape the decision. Foundations do not give money. People inside them do, and the programs or portfolio team is usually where your organisation is first understood, assessed and championed. They rarely sign the cheque. What they do is decide whether your work ever reaches the table where the cheque is signed. This guide shows you how to build a funder file, a short profile of the people who matter to that journey, so your outreach reads like a conversation between colleagues rather than another cold application.
How funding decisions actually get made
It helps to know the route your proposal travels. In most foundations the programs or portfolio team reviews applications, carries out due diligence, and puts together a recommendation. That recommendation then moves up. At the Gates Foundation, program officers review the materials and recommend, and a foundation executive approves the grant (https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/how-we-work). At the Pittsburgh Foundation, the the programs or portfolio team recommendation goes to the full program department and then to a committee of the board, which makes the final call (https://pittsburghfoundation.org/grantfaqs). The pattern is consistent even where the titles differ. the programs or portfolio team are not usually the final decision makers. They are the people who decide whether you get a seat at the table and who argue your case once you are there. That is why understanding them matters, and why, where the board or founders hold the decision, they are worth researching too.”
Why the website is not enough
Most of us do this backwards. We spend hours memorising a foundation’s guidelines and funding history, and no time at all looking at the portfolio manager’s career on LinkedIn. Yet the guidelines tell you what the institution says it wants, while the person tells you how a decision actually gets made. Concentration is the reason this matters. Across the sector, roughly 80% of a nonprofit’s revenue tends to come from about 20% of its funders (Donorly). That means a small number of relationships carry most of your income, and each of those relationships runs through a specific human being. Knowing that person is not a nice to have, it is the work.
Understand where they come from
Start with the career path. Did this person work in the field before moving into grant making? Did they come from government, from research or from a frontline organisation like yours? Someone who spent a decade running programmes will read your proposal differently from someone who came through finance and investment sector. Their history tells you what they value and what evidence will land with them. You can usually piece this together from a LinkedIn profile in a few minutes. It is the single most useful thing you can know before you write a word of outreach.
Notice what they share
Next, look at what they post and engage with. What articles are they sharing? Which themes come up again and again? What are they saying about the direction of their field? This is a live signal of their current interests, and it is far more current than any published strategy document. If a portfolio manager keeps sharing work on locally led development, that tells you how to frame your own. When your outreach speaks to what someone is already thinking about, it stops sounding like spam and starts sounding like a colleague who pays attention.
Map who they are connected to
Finally, look at their network. Who do you both know? A mutual connection is your warm introduction, and a warm introduction is worth more than the most polished cold email. While you are there, notice which other boards they sit on and which organisations they are close to. This tells you how they are positioned in the wider funding ecosystem and it often reveals other doors you had not seen. You are building a small map of one person and the relationships around them, and that map is what makes your approach specific.
What this looks like in practice
A Tanzanian organisation working on adolescent health had spent months studying a foundation’s public strategy with no reply to its emails. When the team shifted focus to the actual programs or portfolio team they found she had started her career as a community nurse in the region and often shared work on youth voice. The next message referenced that history honestly and framed the work around youth leadership rather than service delivery. It was answered within days. Nothing about the organisation had changed. What changed was that the outreach finally spoke to a person not a logo.
If you are short on time
Do not skip this step, shrink it. Pick the single funder most important to your next quarter and give their programme and portfolio team twenty focused minutes. Career, recent posts, mutual connections. Even that much will lift your outreach above the generic applications sitting in their inbox. When you are stretched, precision matters more, not less, because you cannot afford a wasted approach.
With your next plan
Pick one funder organisation from your prospect list. Identify the programs or portfolio team whose judgement shapes the decision. Spend twenty minutes learning about them, their career, their posts, their connections. Write down three things you did not know this morning.
Build your first funder file
Understanding funders as people is a repeatable system, and it is the foundation of every relationship we help organisations build. For the full funder file template we use, join the Funding Africa newsletter for practical fundraising tools each month.