How to find out who funds a charity

Who funds a charity is public information, and three sources answer the question for almost any registered UK charity. Its accounts on the charity register list the grants it received. GrantNav lists every grant to it that a 360Giving funder published. Its annual report names the funders it thanked. Together they list the funders that give to organisations like yours.

Why you would want to know

Trust fundraising works by analogy. A funder that has given to three charities doing what you do, in places like yours, at the size you are, has already answered the hardest question in your case for support: does this funder fund this kind of work. Finding those funders by reading what they gave to your peers is faster and more reliable than reading funders' stated criteria, which are written broadly. It is also the quickest check on a funder you are about to approach, because a funder whose recipients look nothing like you is not a prospect however good its criteria sound.

The method is not about copying a competitor. It is about using the same public record funders use when they check you, which grant due diligence checks describes from the other side.

Source one: the charity register and the accounts

Every charity registered in England and Wales has an entry on the Charity Commission register, searchable free at gov.uk by name, charity number or area of operation. The entry shows the charity's name and address, trustees, "work and aims" and finances, and links to the documents it has filed. Charities with income over £25,000 must file their trustees' annual report and accounts with their annual return within 10 months of their financial year end, so the latest accounts are rarely more than 22 months old. Scotland's register at OSCR and the Northern Ireland register at the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland do the same for their charities; OSCR said accounts documents would appear on its register from 9 March 2026.

Open the most recent accounts and look in three places. The notes to the accounts analyse income, and the note on "income from charitable activities" or "donations and grants" often itemises grants by funder and amount, especially where the funder required it. The trustees' annual report, which precedes the accounts, usually thanks funders by name and sometimes by programme. And the restricted funds note lists each restricted fund with its opening balance, income, spending and closing balance, which tells you not only who funded what but how much is left and when the grant will need replacing.

Smaller charities tell you less. Those with income under £250,000 may file simpler receipts and payments accounts, and many give grants as a single line. Those under £25,000 file no accounts at all. For them, move to the next source.

Source two: GrantNav

GrantNav is 360Giving's free search tool for grants that funders have published. Search for the charity by name or, better, by its identifier, GB-CHC- followed by its charity number, and open its recipient page. The page lists every published grant to it with the funder, amount, date and title, and shows the total. Esmée Fairbairn Foundation's own GrantNav page, for example, listed 12 grants it had received as a recipient between 2016 and 2023 totalling £9,641,318, the largest from Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Download the list as a spreadsheet to sort by funder.

The limit is coverage: only the 355 funders that publish to 360Giving appear. The National Lottery Community Fund, most large trusts and many community foundations are there; most small trusts and companies are not. So a charity's GrantNav page typically shows its lottery and large trust funders and misses the family trusts, which is why the accounts come first. How to use 360Giving data to find funders explains the data and its other uses.

Source three: the charity's own publications

Most charities list their funders on their website, in an annual review or in an impact report, often with logos. These lists are selective, so they are the least complete source, but they are current, and they sometimes name funders that neither publish to 360Giving nor appear in the accounts because the grant was small. Funders' own publications work the other way: a funder's annual report lists its grants, and large funders publish searchable grant lists on their sites. Trust for London, which gives around £10 million a year in London, publishes its funding decisions; so do most lottery distributors.

Putting the three together

Build one table per peer charity with a row per funder: name, amount, year, programme if known, and the source you found it in. Then merge the tables across three or four peers. Funders that appear for two or more peers are your strongest prospects, because they have shown a pattern rather than a one-off. Funders that appear once may have a trustee connection or a local link you cannot reproduce; note them but rank them lower.

For each prospect, the next questions are the ones every funder page on OpenGrant tries to answer: how large is it, what does it typically give, does it have an open scheme, and does it accept unsolicited applications. What is a grant-making trust explains how to read those answers, and how to read a grant-making trust's accounts covers the trusts that publish nothing else.

The reverse search: who funds organisations like yours

If you have your own charity number, OpenGrant's peers lookup does the merging for you. Enter the number and it finds organisations with similar registered purposes, then lists the publishing funders that have given to them, each linked to a funder page showing the funder's register facts, 360Giving totals, typical award and live schemes. It cannot see funders that do not publish, so it complements the accounts rather than replacing them. The guide to GrantNav vs OpenGrant explains what each tool shows.

A worked example

A fictional refugee support charity in Leeds with income of £180,000 picks three peers: a similar charity in Bradford, one in Sheffield and a larger one in Manchester. The Bradford charity's accounts itemise six grants, including two from trusts with no website. The Sheffield charity's GrantNav page shows grants from the National Lottery Community Fund, a community foundation and two national trusts. The Manchester charity's annual report thanks eleven funders. Merging the lists, two national trusts appear for all three peers and one community foundation for two. The charity checks the two trusts on OpenGrant: one has a rolling programme with a median recent grant of £15,000, the other works by invitation. It approaches the first, applies to the community foundation's open fund, and files the invitation-only trust for a future introduction.

Scotland, Northern Ireland and companies

The same method works outside England and Wales with different registers. OSCR's Scottish Charity Register shows each charity's purposes, beneficiaries, activities and income and expenditure by year, and OSCR said it would publish trustee names and accounts documents from 9 March 2026. The Charity Commission for Northern Ireland publishes accounts with each annual return. A company limited by guarantee that is not a charity, or a community interest company, files at Companies House, where the accounts may list grants received but rarely itemise them; for those organisations GrantNav and the annual report carry more of the weight. Identifiers follow the register: GB-SC- for Scottish charities, GB-NIC- for Northern Irish ones and GB-COH- for companies in 360Giving data.

What not to do

Do not write to a funder claiming a connection with the charity you researched, and do not quote another charity's grant as a reason you deserve one. Funders know their own grant lists. Use the research to choose where to apply and to make your own case well, and keep the table you built; it is the start of the tracker your pipeline will need.