The Foundation Center’s foundation maps are an excellent resource to find out who is funding what and where. They draw from the most comprehensive database of U.S. and global foundations and their grants. These maps offer information on who is providing funding, who is getting funding, and what funding is available. These tools can help you identify funding trends, see existing networks and monitor changes across the sector. See our previous post on foundation maps.
See a full list of Foundation Center’s custom maps, along with options on how to create your own on their website. Here are some examples from their custom maps:
- Foundation Funding for U.S. Democracy: Most of these maps have a brief introduction to how to use them to get the most out of it. In this particular map, you have the option of seeing your search results as charts, by location, as a list or by the constellations tool. The map gives you information by state in two stages- first providing you with overview information on the number of grants, the total value in U.S. dollars, the total number of funders and the total number of recipients. You then have the option to see details of foundations, recipients and grants. If you choose to explore the funding scenario for U.S. democracy through graphs, you get an overview of the total number of grants, their value, and the total number of funders and recipients, followed by graphs showing the breakdown of the funds in four main pillars. You can filter results by foundations or recipients, by location, and by subject area. Another great feature is the constellations option, where you see a map of the networks and identify points of connection. You can explore these by using the same results filters. You can also navigate constellations using the tabular option, which gives you lists of organizations and networks with complete detailed information on funding foundations. Finally, if all these tools get too confusing, you can see the funding landscape as a list using the same filtering tools.
- What’s really nice about these tools is that they can be adapted for all kinds of research, and customized to fit your needs. For instance, Foundation Maps for Early Childhood Development in East Africa, uses the same tool as above, but it is customized to their available data, giving you the option to navigate it by either map or list. Measuring the State of Disaster Philanthropy also uses the same tool, but expands to showing foundation data across the world.
- If you are seeking more traditional presentations, Grantmakers Concerned about Immigrants and Refugees‘ map is quite useful. It maps grants by state, and provides a brief overview with the option to see a detailed list with the breakdown of grantmaker, recipient, start year and total amount in dollars. The filtering panel is very straightforward, with a check list for strategies, grant years and geographic scope.