Explore practical, plain-English guides on running and funding nonprofit programs — from grant management and impact reporting to foundation research, grantee due diligence, and reading IRS filings.
A practical guide for funders on publishing criteria, documenting decisions, sharing feedback and maintaining audit trails to build trust with applicants.
From application to impact reporting, step by step.
Your 990-PF is public and machine-readable. What outside analysts can compute from it, and what it says about your grantmaking.
Improving communication and reporting.
The benefits of one source of truth.
What qualifying distributions actually include, why published payout figures disagree, and what the aggregate data shows.
Ensuring funding supports mission goals.
Disciplined habits that make programmes fair, fast and auditable.
A grant to a revoked organization may not count as a qualifying distribution. The checks that matter, in order.
A review of GivingData — portfolio analytics and grant lifecycle management for private foundations.
Digital-first expectations.
Addressing cross-border compliance.
Tips and tools for streamlining grantee due diligence checks using technology.
Restricted grants, unrestricted income, full cost recovery, and SORP accounting for UK charities.
The best Blackbaud Grantmaking alternatives for UK funders in 2026 — platforms with lower cost, faster deployment and built-in UK compliance.
Lasting lessons.
Which is right for your organisation?
A quick reference for funders and grantees.
Charitable capital that comes back. The three-part test, why PRIs count toward the 5% payout, and when a grant is the better tool.
Optimising each stage of the cycle.
A clear definition and why it matters for funders and charities.
Mixing tech with human insight.
Tools to assess outcomes.
Small changes with big impact.
Explaining the concept clearly.
The evolution from spreadsheets to AI tools.
Insights from the other side—what helps and what creates friction for applicants.
Special considerations for sustainability-focused funds.
How digital tools are reshaping giving.
AI-powered due diligence automates register lookups, policy reading and financial analysis to cut check times from hours to minutes.
DAFs hold hundreds of billions and face no distribution requirement. How they work, what the payout data shows, and why they complicate research.
An honest comparison of grantmaking platforms for US private, family, corporate and community foundations.
Errors, delays, and wasted staff time.
Balancing tradition and technology.
Balancing automation with ethical oversight.
Plan, track and report budgets with assurance and simplicity.
Making eligibility easy to understand for applicants.
A comprehensive guide to grant management from application through impact, featuring AI-powered solutions.
Definitions and essentials.
How compliance technology benefits funders.
Where artificial intelligence helps and where caution is needed.
Risks of fines, reputational damage, and lost trust.
Balancing numbers with stories.
How reliable are AI-generated impact reports? We examine accuracy, hallucination risks, grounding techniques, and when to trust AI-written summaries.
How leading platforms compare on due diligence, assessment and impact.
Avoiding heavy reporting for small sums.
The best alternatives to Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud for grant management in 2026 — purpose-built platforms that cost less and deploy faster.
Tailored solutions for local funders.
Practical guide to automating reviewer assignments, scoring, and feedback while keeping expert judgement central.
Who counts as a mandated reporter, what triggers the duty, and how case records should handle it.
Covering pre-award, award, and post-award phases.
Strengthening the sector.
How it fits in the grant lifecycle.
Breaking down the features that define complete systems.
Best practice guide for digital grant-making — from application through assessment to monitoring and reporting.
Using open data sources like Companies House.
A step-by-step guide to moving grant management from Excel to a dedicated system — the parallel-running approach, what to migrate, and how long it takes.
From grant management to fundraising.
Making funding more inclusive for small or minority-led charities.
How community foundations and funders administer donor-advised and named funds — fund ledgers, fees, statements, transfers, and donor-facing portals.
Handling complexity at scale.
Identifying, monitoring, and mitigating risks early.
How funders can combine AI efficiency with human judgement — covering triage, due diligence, assessment, and feedback.
Breaking down the basics.
Costs, efficiency, and value.
Ensuring encryption, privacy, and trust.
A candid comparison of grant management platforms for US foundations, and how to judge vendor AI claims.
Steps to make processes faster and fairer.
Why specialisation matters.
Define outcomes, collect the minimum useful data, and tell the story.
A review of CommunityForce — an AI-powered platform for managing scholarships, grants, and awards together.
Building resilience for 2030 and beyond.
Providing value even to those declined.
Policies, checks, and safeguards.
The best Fluxx alternatives for grantmakers in 2026: Foundant, SmartSimple, Plinth and others compared on features, pricing and UK compliance.
Bringing structure to personal giving.
Scaling without increasing staff costs.
How funders can make applications proportionate while still getting the data they need for accountability.
Be systematic and proportionate; act early with clear escalation routes.
How audit trails in grant management software protect accountability, reduce fraud risk and satisfy regulators across the full grant lifecycle.
A review of Benevity — the leading platform for corporate employee giving programmes that includes grant management.
A review of OpenGrants — a grant discovery tool for applicants, not a grant management system for funders.
A review of Bonterra Grants Management — corporate foundation and high-volume grantmaking platform.
Why it matters for accountability.
How AI helps funders detect fraud risks through anomaly detection, reputation checks and duplicate flagging — while keeping processes fair and proportionate.
Overlaps, differences, and when to use both.
A practical roundup of free or open‑source approaches for small rounds.
How technology drives social impact.
Why cloud beats on-premise.
Four capability gaps that follow from the shape of a grants directory, and what we built instead.
Off-the-shelf tools vs custom systems.
The best Foundant GLM alternatives for foundations in 2026 — mid-market grant management platforms compared on features, UK compliance and pricing.
The most frequent grant management mistakes funders make, from unclear criteria to disproportionate reporting, with practical fixes backed by sector research.
How UK charities can use AI to research, shortlist and prioritise trusts and foundations to apply to — and where human judgement still matters.
Essential UK compliance requirements and practical controls for funders.
How automation changes the reporting cycle.
How funders can choose impact measurement tools that collect proportionate data, reduce grantee burden, and turn outcomes into actionable insights.
Pros, cons, and hidden costs.
A review of WizeHive (Zengine) — highly configurable grant and scholarship management, now part of Submittable.
Training volunteers and experts for consistent scoring.
What makes Plinth different?
Every grant connects a funder to a nonprofit, and every nonprofit back to its other funders. What that network reveals.
The best SmartSimple alternatives for grant management in 2026 — purpose-built platforms with faster deployment and UK compliance built in.
Forecasting grant outcomes with AI.
Guidance for reviewers.
Most foundation benchmarking compares the wrong things to the wrong peers. Building a defensible comparison set and reading the results.
Making personal giving structured and impactful.
Discovering what drives success.
How UK funders can prevent, detect and respond to grant fraud using proportionate controls, automation and audit trails.
How artificial intelligence is changing the way foundations and philanthropists allocate funds.
A review of eCivis (EUNA Grants) — US government grant compliance software not suited to UK funders.
The three duties every US nonprofit board member owes, and how Form 990 made governance public.
Both are 501(c)(3). The difference is where the money comes from — and it drives payout rules, excise taxes and disclosure.
A review of AkoyaGO — foundation management built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 with all-inclusive pricing.
Using insights for future funding.
Running local programmes effectively.
Funding portals give applicants one public front door that screens and routes them to the right fund. How they work, and why funders running multiple funds use them.
Options for those with limited budgets.
A concise checklist of capabilities that matter and why.
Individual grant decisions are usually sound. The portfolio they add up to is often nobody's decision. How to analyze it.
What Candid's Foundation Directory does well, where the alternatives differ, and how to pick without overpaying.
Turning long text into quick insights.
Practical ways funders can use AI to reduce burden, improve equity and strengthen grantee relationships while keeping trust and power-sharing central.
Aligning CSR budgets with community needs.
Choose proportionate methods and feed learning back into design.
A review of Optimy — European CSR platform combining grant management with volunteering and sponsorship.
Ensuring compliance and learning before ending.
The best Submittable alternatives for grant management in 2026 — compared on deployment speed, UK compliance, post-award depth and pricing.
Using data visualisation for quick insights.
NTEE codes drive most sector analysis and are wrong more often than people assume. How the hierarchy works and how to use it safely.
Comparing practices across regions.
How bias shapes grant funding outcomes, where AI helps and where it introduces new risks, and practical steps to make decisions fairer.
How private foundations can legally fund foreign NGOs, LLCs and non-charities — the five-step process under IRC 4945(h).
How AI reduces energy use and carbon impact compared with manual work.
Barriers for small organisations.
Doing more with less.
Supporting CSR budgets.
Logic model definition — how it maps inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact for charity programmes.
A step-by-step guide to the grant application process, including preparation, submission, and follow-up strategies.
A practical guide to ethical AI in grantmaking covering governance, bias, transparency, data protection and human oversight for UK funders.
Key differences by region.
A side-by-side comparison.
A five-year review is a project, not a report. How to reconstruct the record, benchmark it, and reach findings a board can act on.
Most grant applications fail on fit, not writing. A research process using public IRS filings to qualify prospects fast.
Simplified explanation.
Proportionate monitoring approaches that reduce admin for charities while keeping funders accountable. Includes frameworks, comparison tables, and AI tools.