How to Read a Foundation's Form 990-PF

Every private foundation in the United States files a Form 990-PF with the IRS each year, and every one of those filings is public. For a grant seeker, the 990-PF is the most useful document in existence: it tells you, in the foundation's own numbers, who it funds, how much it gives, and how to approach it. Learning to read one well is the highest-leverage research skill in fundraising.

What a 990-PF is

The 990-PF is the annual tax return for a private foundation. It is filed with the IRS and becomes public record. Check the fiscal year on each return: filing and publication delays vary, and an available return may be several years old. Use it to understand giving patterns, then verify current guidelines with the funder.

The grants list — the part that matters most

Buried in the 990-PF (historically in Part XV, on a schedule of grants paid) is a line-by-line list of every grant the foundation made that year: the recipient's name, often its city and state, the amount, and frequently a short purpose. This is the single most valuable section. Read it and you learn, concretely, what the foundation actually funds — not what its mission statement says, but where the money went.

Look for three things: recipients whose work resembles yours, recipients in your geography, and the range of grant amounts. If a foundation made forty grants between $5,000 and $25,000 to youth programs in one state, you have learned its niche in thirty seconds.

Application rules — read these before you write anything

The 990-PF also reports how the foundation handles applications. Many foundations state plainly that they do not accept unsolicited proposals, or that they give only to pre-selected organizations. Others list an application address, a contact, and submission deadlines. Read this section first: it tells you whether a direct application is even possible, or whether your route in is a relationship.

The numbers that size your ask

A few financial figures help you calibrate. Total giving for the year shows the foundation's scale. Total assets indicate how much it could give. And the distribution of grant sizes in the grants list tells you what a realistic request looks like — ask for an amount that sits comfortably inside the range the foundation already gives, not above it.

A faster way

Reading 990-PFs one at a time is thorough but slow. Bespoke Grants indexes the 990 data for 225,000+ foundations and 13M+ individual grants, so the grants list, giving history, and application signals for any funder are already organized on a single profile page — and matched to your nonprofit.