Fundraising assistant

• Organization search: Finds nonprofits and foundations by name, location, or description of their work and references Candid’s organization data including their programs, missions, and operational details.
• Grants search: Searches historical grant transactions to understand funding patterns and what organizations are supporting. Uses Candid’s grants data (up to 25 top results per query). Note: This is for research, not recommendations. 
• Grants awarded and received: Looks up specific grants given by a particular funder or received by a particular nonprofit. Uses the same grants data but filtered to individual organizations.
• Candid’s knowledge base search: Searches Candid’s expert content including help articles, blog posts, research reports from IssueLab, news articles, video training transcripts, and other sector resources.

• Funder recommendations:  Suggests funders likely to support nonprofit’s work by analyzing nonprofit’s mission, program details, funder activities, and historical grants. 

• Request for proposals (RFP): Finds open funding opportunities that match a nonprofit’s work. 

• Budget estimator: Provides guidance on setting an appropriate budget for a grant request based on the project description and funder’s giving patterns. 

• Letter of Inquiry (LOI) writer: Creates a draft letter of inquiry using information about the nonprofit, funder, project description, and requested budget. 

The fundraising assistant is powered by Candid’s proprietary data platform, which includes nonprofit profiles, funder records, historical grants data, IRS Form 990 filings, and Candid’s editorial and research content. This is the same data that has been trusted by the philanthropic sector for decades — the fundraising assistant simply makes it conversational and actionable.

Recommendations are generated by analyzing alignment between your organization’s mission, issue areas, geography, and budget against the historical giving patterns and stated priorities of funders in Candid’s data. The quality of recommendations improves significantly when you share more context about your organization. As with any AI-powered tool, we recommend reviewing recommendations with human judgment before committing to an application strategy.

The LOI engine produces a strong, tailored starting point — not a finished product. We recommend treating every draft as a first draft that benefits from your organization’s voice, your relationship with the funder, and your own review. The fundraising assistant is designed to save you time on the hardest part of getting started, not to replace the human judgment and relationship-building that win grants. 

The context you share with the fundraising assistant — your mission, programs, budget, and grant history — is used only to personalize your results within your session. Candid does not use the organizational data shared via the fundraising assistant to train other models or share fundraising assistant data with other users. 

Note that we capture the prompts (questions) and the answers the fundraising assistant has given. These answers are available in our data for up to 90 days to evaluate performance of the fundraising assistant and the cost of operation.