Finding the Right Person to Contact

The strongest grant relationships rarely start with the program officer everyone else emails. They start with a real connection — someone on a funder's board or staff who already cares about your work, or who shares a thread with someone on your team.

You can ask the agent to find that person.

"Who's a good person to reach out to at the Cascade Community Foundation?"

What it actually does

It looks past the listed contact and researches the people actually behind the funder, hunting for a genuine opening rather than a job title. Sometimes that's someone whose own history says they'd care about your work — a trustee whose side project is writing a cookbook is a real opening for a soup kitchen. Sometimes it's a thread back to your own team: a shared school, a former employer, a board someone already sits on with one of your people.

What you get back

A short ranked list: who to approach, why they're a fit, how to reach them, and — when an email is available — a drafted intro ready to send. The official contact is in there too, clearly labelled, since that door is still worth using.

Doing it across a whole sheet

You don't have to go one funder at a time. Ask for it as a field and the agent will fill it for every row:

"Add a Best Contact field and fill it in for all of these."

That's usually the better move on a fresh prospect list — you get the whole picture at once and can work down it.

Getting better results

The agent can only find a connection between your team and a funder's people if it knows who your people are. Telling it — or putting a staff and board list in Reference Materials — is what turns "this trustee funds education" into "this trustee went to the same school as your ED."

Board bios, staff pages, and even a list of where your team previously worked all help.

A note on where this is

This feature is in beta and we're actively refining it. Finding the right relationship is one of the most important and most overlooked parts of winning a grant, so it's getting sustained attention. Tell us when it misses.