How to read a foundation 990 in 15 minutes (and what to look for)

Sponsor a Purpose team · 4 min read · 2026-08-19

Every private foundation in the country has to file a Form 990-PF, and every one of those filings is public. That is one of the best-kept secrets in fundraising: before you write a single word of an application, you can read exactly what a foundation has funded, how much they gave, and who is on their board.

A 990 looks like fifteen pages of tax jargon, so plenty of applicants never open one. You need four sections, and you can get through all of them in about fifteen minutes.

Where to find the filing

You can pull a foundation's 990-PF for free from the IRS's own search tool, or from Candid's 990 finder. If you already know which foundation you are looking at, our foundation directory links out to public filings and also summarizes the numbers below on each funder's profile, so you can skip straight to qualifying.

Part 1: Total giving and average grant size

Flip to Part XV of the form (grants and contributions paid). Do not read every line yet. Just look at two numbers:

• Total grants paid for the year.
• Number of grants, which you get by counting the rows (or dividing total giving by the average, if the form states one).

Divide total by count and you get the average grant size. This single number saves you more wasted effort than anything else in the filing. If a foundation's average grant is $3,000, do not build a proposal asking for $40,000. If their average is $75,000, a $2,000 ask may not clear their internal cost of processing a grant.

Part 2: Who actually got funded

Now read the recipient list itself. You are looking for three things:

• Organization size and type. Are the recipients grassroots nonprofits your size, or are they universities, hospital systems, and national organizations? A foundation that gave $2 million to five Ivy League schools is not a realistic target for a $10,000 ask from a two-person nonprofit, no matter how well your mission fits their stated focus.
• Cause alignment. Does the actual recipient list match the cause area on the foundation's website, or has their giving drifted somewhere else? Mission statements age; check lists don't.
• Repeat names. If the same twenty organizations appear year after year, that foundation may not be accepting new grantees, even if their website says otherwise. Worth a quick email before you invest hours in an application.

You can browse recipients by cause on our causes directory if you want to see which foundations are actively funding a specific area like education, animal welfare, or human services right now.

Part 3: Officers, directors, and trustees

Part VIII lists the foundation's officers, directors, and trustees, usually with their titles and sometimes their employers. This section matters for two reasons.

First, it tells you who actually decides. A family foundation run by three family members behaves very differently from one with a professional program officer and a formal review process. Second, it is your best shot at finding a warm connection. If someone on your board, your executive director's network, or a major donor's circle knows a trustee, a short, personal introduction beats a cold letter of inquiry almost every time.

Part 4: Assets and the 5 percent rule

Private foundations are required to distribute roughly 5 percent of their investment assets each year to keep their tax status. You can find total assets near the top of the form. This tells you two things:

• Capacity. A foundation sitting on $50 million in assets has a lot more room to fund a new organization than one with $2 million, even if their current giving looks similar.
• Whether they are giving enough. If a foundation's payout looks thin relative to their assets, they may be in a year of catching up on the requirement, which occasionally means more openness to new grantees than usual.

Putting it together

Fifteen minutes on a 990 answers the four questions that decide whether an application is worth writing: how much do they actually give, who do they actually fund, who decides, and how much room do they have. Do this before every application and you will apply to fewer foundations, but the ones you do apply to will fit.

If you are tracking more than a handful of foundations this way, a spreadsheet gets unwieldy fast, especially once you are juggling deadlines, contacts, and notes from each filing. The free Sponsor a Purpose CRM keeps all of that, deadlines, contacts, and outcomes, in one place instead of scattered across tabs.

And before any of those applications go out, it is worth a quick gut check on how your organization looks from the outside. Funders will visit your website before they write a check, and our free website grader scores yours in about a minute so you know what they will see first.