Giving Compass' Take:

• Vu Le announces that Fundr, a new app to match nonprofits and foundations, is a collaborative effort to bring a tech solution to a long-standing grantmaking problem. 

• Does this tool make sense for the needs of your organization? How else can grantmaking be streamlined through technology? 

• Learn about ways to be a better grantmaker. 

A common gripe that nonprofits have is that applying for grant funding is tedious and time-consuming, often spending 20 hours for a $5,000 grant that could only be spent on glue sticks. Foundations, meanwhile, complain that grant proposals are torturous to read through, with the same boring statistics, dry writing style, and overdone sob stories. Across the sector, millions of hours are wasted each year in this process. There has to be a better way.

Thus was born the idea for Fundr, an app that matches nonprofits and foundations quickly and efficiently. Nonprofits would each create a profile detailing their vision, mission, values, outcomes, metrics, budget, and other information normally asked in grant applications. Foundations would in parallel load information about their priorities, grant size, other nonprofits they fund, and additional relevant information. Both parties would review one another’s profiles and swipe left to reject or swipe right to indicate interest. When there is a match—i.e., both organizations swiped right—the app informs the groups, who can then schedule a site visit.

If this sounds familiar, it is. “The growth of the nonprofit sector is continually inspired by the marriage of best practices and innovation, and lessons taken from dating apps like Tinder and Grindr are the natural next step on our sector’s journey,” says Jon Pratt, executive director of the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits (MCN). “We’ve always known that nonprofits and foundations need each other, and yet finding the right match can be a challenge on both sides.”

Fundr, still in its beta-testing stage, is a collaboration between GrantAdvisor, sector commentary blog Nonprofit AF, and Grant Professionals Association, with technical help from app developers. It plans to launch in Summer 2019. So far, trial group participants have expressed hopeful optimism.

Read the full article about Fundr by Vu Le at Nonprofit AF.