Prospect research tools for freelance trust fundraisers

A freelance trust fundraiser needs four layers of tooling: the charity registers for funders' facts, GrantNav for published grants, a source of open calls, and a tracker the freelancer owns. Most of it is free; the paid choices concern small-trust coverage and multi-client licences. This guide lists the tools by layer with prices checked on 26 October 2026.

What is different about freelance research

A sole fundraiser researches one organisation's prospects and keeps them for years. A freelancer researches for several clients with different causes, places, legal forms and income bands, often in the same week, and carries the method rather than the list from one to the next. That changes the requirements. Tools with an income cap or a geographic limit exclude some clients. Tools licensed to one organisation cannot lawfully be shared across a portfolio. And the tracker has to leave with the freelancer when the contract ends, with the client's confidential records handed over and the reusable funder knowledge kept.

Layer one: the registers

Every funder that is a charity is on a register, and the registers are free. The Charity Commission register at gov.uk covers England and Wales and shows each charity's trustees, work and aims, finances and filed accounts, searchable by name, charity number or area of operation; the whole dataset can be downloaded. OSCR's Scottish Charity Register and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland's register do the same for their nations, and OSCR said trustee names and accounts documents would appear from 9 March 2026. Companies House holds the accounts of CICs and charitable companies.

The registers answer the questions no directory answers reliably: how big is this trust now, what did it give last year, what does its trustees' report say about applications. How to read a grant-making trust's accounts is the fifteen-minute routine. OpenGrant's funders A to Z sits on top of the registers and lists every charity whose entry says it makes grants to organisations, with the register facts and any live schemes on one page.

Layer two: published grants

GrantNav is 360Giving's free search of grants funders have published: 1,565,468 grants from 355 funders on 26 October 2026, searchable by funder, recipient, keyword, region and amount, and downloadable under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. For a freelancer it is the fastest way to test a hunch about a funder and the only way to see who funds a client's peers. How to use 360Giving data to find funders covers the four searches. OpenGrant shows the same data as a typical award and recipient split on each publishing funder's page, and its peers lookup runs the peer search from a client's charity number.

Layer three: open calls and deadlines

This is the layer where free and paid tools diverge, and where the money goes.

Free. GOV.UK Find a grant lists government grants with eligibility and alerts. The National Lottery Community Fund programme finder lists its programmes by nation, amount and decision time, and the other distributors publish theirs. Funding Scotland, Funding Wales and Charity Excellence's Funding Finder are free directories for their nations or for registered users. OpenGrant's free tier shows every open scheme in its sources with full criteria, 1,035 on 26 October 2026, with a weekly alert. Free UK grant finders sets out what each covers and leaves out.

Paid directories. GrantFinder is the deepest editorial database of UK funders, including small trusts that publish nothing; its VCSE Essentials plan cost £1,020 a year for one user and Growth £1,500 for up to three users on 26 October 2026, with a 12-month term. My Funding Central, from the same company, cost £100 to £750 plus VAT a year by income band but is limited to organisations in England with income up to £1 million and is licensed per organisation, which rules it out for a portfolio. Funds Online, the Directory of Social Change's database, was open to existing subscribers only at £475 plus VAT after DSC announced its closure in October 2026. NICVA's GrantTracker covers Northern Ireland at £165 a year, or £115 for members. GrantFinder alternatives in 2026 compares the options in detail.

OpenGrant. Every open scheme with full criteria and a weekly alert is free with an account. Full access at £29 a month per email account adds funder research and published past giving, unlimited peer lookups, daily alerts, CSV export of search results, calendar files for deadlines and notes, billed monthly and cancelled any time. It has no income cap and no nation restriction. Its weakness is the one the paid directories address: it is built from funder websites, published feeds and open data, so a small trust with no website and no 360Giving record appears with its register facts only, not an editorial description. GrantNav vs OpenGrant explains the split between the two open-data tools.

Layer four: the tracker

The tracker is the one tool a freelancer must own. A spreadsheet per client with the fields in grant application tracker: what to record and why is enough: funder, programme, stage, route, realistic amount, target month, submitted and decision dates, outcome, feedback and reapplication date. Keep funder research notes, which are reusable across clients, in a separate file from client application records, which are confidential and are handed over at the end of the contract. OpenGrant's saved grants and alerts can hold a client's live shortlist, and the CSV export in the paid tier moves a search into the tracker. How to build a trust fundraising pipeline describes the stages the tracker records.

Rules that affect freelancers

Two funder rules matter more to a freelancer than to a staff fundraiser. The National Lottery Community Fund's Awards for All England guidance says it does not accept applications written by private businesses, consultants or bid writers on an organisation's behalf, so the freelancer's role on lottery bids is research, planning and coaching, and the organisation writes and submits. And several funders ask who prepared an application, so agree with each client how your involvement is described. Database licences are the other constraint: read whether a subscription is per user, per organisation or per email account before using it across clients.

A working combination

A fictional freelance fundraiser with five small-charity clients in the North West and one in Scotland uses the registers and GrantNav for every funder check, OpenGrant's free tier for open calls with a saved search and weekly alert per client, and one paid tool chosen for the portfolio. Because the clients span two nations and one has income over £1 million, My Funding Central is out; the choice is between a single-user GrantFinder seat for its small-trust coverage and OpenGrant's paid tier for the peers lookup, exports and monthly billing, and the fundraiser trials each against a month of real work. The trackers are spreadsheets the fundraiser owns, one per client, and the Scottish client's research starts from the OSCR register rather than the Commission's. Total tooling cost is between £348 and £1,020 a year, against day rates that make a single avoided wasted application worth more.

What to check quarterly

Prices, licences and coverage change. Recheck each paid tool's pricing page before renewing, re-read the licence if your client list has changed, and refresh the funder facts in your reusable notes from the registers, because a trust's latest accounts can move it from prospect to not. The compare page tracks the main databases' prices and coverage with dates.