AI Prospect Research for Small Nonprofits: Start With the Free Route

Prospect research means finding out which foundations and people are likely to support your work, and how to approach them. Paid AI tools can do a lot of it, but they start at thousands of dollars a year. A small nonprofit can get most of the way with free public data and an AI assistant it already has, and should start there.

We haven't used the paid prospect research tools below ourselves. Everything on this page comes from the sources' own pages, checked on October 24, 2026.

The free route

1. Foundations: read their tax returns. Private foundations file Form 990-PF, which lists their grants. Two free places to find them:

• ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer has summary financial data from returns processed since 2012, full Form 990 documents, and full-text search across filings. No account is needed.
• The IRS's Tax Exempt Organization Search covers Form 990 series returns, the 990-N postcard, and determination letters.

Reading a foundation's recent 990-PF tells you who it funded, for how much, and in which places. That's a practical guide to where its next grants may go.

2. Candid's free plan. Candid's pricing page lists a free plan with limited search results, one full profile view a month, and 25 credits a month for its AI fundraising assistant. Its knowledge base lists two ways to get more for free: in-person access at Candid's partner locations, and a free year of Premium for organizations with revenue or expenses under $1 million that earn Candid's 2026 Gold Seal of Transparency. Paid Premium is $1,199 a year for verified non-funding organizations; see Candid in our directory.

3. An AI assistant to do the reading. Download a foundation's 990-PF and ask the assistant to list grants in your field, the typical size, and the places funded. Then ask for a one-page brief: what the foundation supports, recent grants like yours, and questions to answer before you apply. Check every figure against the return itself; AI can misread a table.

People: what's public and what isn't

For individuals, be careful about what you look for and what you keep.

Donor lists aren't public for most charities. The IRS says an exempt organization is generally not required to disclose the names or addresses of its contributors from Schedule B. The Schedule B instructions make the exceptions plain: Schedule B is public for private foundations filing Form 990-PF and for section 527 political organizations. For other Form 990 filers, contributor names and addresses aren't required to be made public.

Follow the field's ethics. Apra, the professional association for prospect researchers, has a Statement of Ethics that tells researchers to "track data provenance to ensure all information is legally obtained and publicly available from reliable sources" and to "record and disclose only information appropriate for fundraising activities." Apra's AI ethics toolkit is for members only, but its description names the issues: biases and errors in data, donor privacy, vetting vendors, and "the need for continual human review of AI tools."

In practice: use AI to summarize public information about a person you're about to meet, keep only what's relevant to the conversation, and never put your donor database into an AI tool your organization hasn't approved for it. Our donor data privacy guide shows which AI plans train on what you type.

When a paid tool makes sense

Paid tools earn their cost when you're screening hundreds or thousands of donors for capacity, or researching many prospects every week. What the vendors publish, as of October 2026:

Vendor	Published price
Dataro	From $15,000 a year, plus $0.10 per active donor
Kindsight (iWave)	Starting prices of $4,500 and $5,800; the billing period isn't stated
DonorSearch	Core plans not published; its Salesforce app is listed at $209 a month per company
Windfall	Not published

Compare those with the free route above before you sign. If your development work is one person preparing for a few meetings a month, the free route and an AI assistant on your organization's account will likely cover it.

A simple routine

1. Each month, pick the five foundations most likely to fund you, from their 990-PF grants.
2. Have an AI assistant summarize each one into a one-page brief, with figures checked against the return.
3. For each donor meeting, prepare a brief from your own notes and public information only.
4. Keep what you learn in your donor database, not in chat histories.

For more fundraising workflows, read AI for fundraising, and for the rules to set first, our nonprofit AI policy template. Before adding any paid tool, the free audit checks what you already pay against verified nonprofit pricing.