My Best Prospects: Overview

What is My Best Prospects?

My Best Prospects (MBP) is an intelligent software program contained in FoundationSearch which examines the key funding parameters of a given project and compares these to the giving behavior of the nearly 11,000 foundation funders in FoundationSearch to create a ranked list of the most likely funders for any project.

Why did we create My Best Prospects?

Metasoft has worked with over 11,000 non-profit grantseekers and grantmakers since 1995. During this period, our members have made hundreds of thousands of requests for funding from foundations and corporations. Our research has shown that the single most frequent reason cited by foundations not funding a proposal is that the request falls outside of one or more of their funding guidelines. In fact, our research shows that over 40% of proposals received by foundations are rejected for this reason alone. In a detailed examination of these refused funding requests, we determined most would have likely been funded by other funders – if the grantseeker had been able to identify these grantmakers as best prospects and a proposal had been directed to them. From this problem, the notion was born of creating an intelligent program which could take a project and quickly and automatically sort through the millions of funder data points, and convert years of research effort into mere minutes, to create a list of Best Prospects.

How do we know My Best Prospects works?

The simple answer is: because we tested it extensively and repeatedly against foundation granting behavior shown in nearly 1,000,000 grants made by foundations to Canadian non-profits to ensure it worked. We employed a “real world” testing methodology to determine the accuracy of MBP in generating a ranked list of 250 Best Prospects for a wide range of projects. First, more than 800,000 “historical grants” were selected from FoundationSearch, and the actual granting foundation was noted. The criteria that defined each of these grants were input into the MBP program. MBP then scored all 11,000 foundations based on each set of grant parameters, to find the best prospects for the grant. We then looked to see where the original funder for each of the test grants appeared on the list of best prospects created by MBP.

The results were very impressive: for 95.14% of the test grants, MBP ranked the actual funder in the top 250 Best Prospects list. Additionally, the actual funder was ranked at an average 53rd position within the Best Prospects list. MBP truly takes the “guesswork” out of prospect identification.