Prospecting

Build and manage research lists of potential funders with AI-powered enrichment.

Overview

Prospecting in GrantLoop works like a smart spreadsheet. You create tables of potential funders, and LouEllen researches and fills in information about each one — from contact emails to average grant sizes to personalized fit statements.

Creating a Prospecting Project

1. Click New at the top of the sidebar
2. Choose Sheet
3. Name it (e.g., "2026 Foundation Research" or "Climate Funders")

Or just ask in chat: "Make me a new sheet for climate funders." That's usually faster, and the agent will start filling it in.

Finding Funders

Ask LouEllen to search for potential funders. The search covers historical grantmaker giving drawn from public tax filings — the record of who funders have actually paid, and how much.

A note from us: A lot of users ask what the best way to prompt prospecting is. Honestly? Just ask. Even "Find us some grants" sets off a great deal of work behind the scenes — we've spent a long time teaching the agent how to hunt, precisely so that you don't have to know how.

Simple — Let the agent do the heavy lifting:

"Find us some grants."

Even from a prompt this bare, you'll get back a considered list of funders who plausibly fund work like yours, with the reasoning attached. You don't need to be an expert prompter to get good results.

Specific — Hone in on a particular strategy:

"We've decided to focus on local foundations with an average check size of $10,000 or more. Find foundations in our state that match."

Use this when you have a clear fundraising strategy and want LouEllen to execute against specific criteria — geography, grant size, cause area, or funding type.

Strategic — Co-pilot your approach with the agent:

"We've found a couple dozen great opportunities using GrantLoop, but I feel like we've exhausted the obvious pipeline. What other prospecting methods or niche funding areas could we explore that we haven't tried yet?"

You might get suggestions for approaches you haven't considered — searching by program methodology, looking at corporate foundations, exploring fiscal sponsorship models, or targeting foundations that fund capacity building rather than direct services.

Researching a whole column at once (Wide Research)

This is the most powerful thing LouEllen does. A field can carry a research prompt saying what you want to know, and the column gets worked down, answering it for every funder in the list.

You ask for it in chat. Describe the field you want and it gets created and starts filling in; ask for a column that already exists to be filled in and the same happens. It runs in the background, so you'll see cells update as they finish, and a Filling Field action in the chat while it's happening.

The world is your oyster. You can research virtually anything about a foundation's historical giving. Some examples:

Those five are illustrations of the kinds of thing that work, not a menu. Anything you could research about a funder by hand — how their giving has trended, whether they've ever funded a program like yours, how much of their money stays in your state, who else they fund that looks like you — is a fair prompt.

You never have to phrase it as a field. Describe what you want to know in chat and the fields get set up and start filling in.

Working with Your Table

Adding Rows

Manually: Click "Add Row" below the table.

With LouEllen: Ask in chat to search for funders and add them to your table.

Editing Cells

Click any cell to edit it directly. Changes save automatically.

Managing Fields

Click + Add Field to create new fields. Field types are text, number, date, select, multi-select, and checkbox.

To edit or delete a field, hover over the field header and click the three-dot menu.

Exporting Data

Click Export in the toolbar to download the table as a CSV, which opens in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers. Exporting requires a paid plan — on Free you'll be prompted to upgrade.

Board View

Any sheet can add a Board view — a tab that shows your prospects as cards grouped into columns (called groups) by a single-select field like Status. Drag a card from one group to another to update that field — for example, dragging a foundation from "Researching" to "Ready to Apply" changes its Status. Drag a group's header left or right to reorder the groups. Each group is one option of that select field, so renaming a group renames the option everywhere it appears — in the table, in dropdowns, and on every card.

Tips

• Start broad, then filter — Cast a wide net with your initial search, then use fields like "Fit Score" to prioritize
• Use select fields for status tracking — Create options like "Researching", "Ready to Apply", "Applied", "Declined"
• Combine LouEllen's research with your own — Researching a whole column is great for a first pass, but verify the details you're going to act on
• Ask for help strategizing — Before diving in, talk through your approach. LouEllen can suggest search strategies you might not have considered