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Our free grant finder for charities enables you to search for more charitable grants than any other grant finder. Or use the Company Donations Finder to find companies that make grants, plus lots more.
Find Funding, Free Help & Resources - Everything Is Free.
Quick, simple, free, built to meet your needs and with access to more grant makers than any other charitable grant finder anywhere.
Funding Finder doesn't just hold its own charitable grants, its Funding Finder links connect you to a global network of 400+ other online charity funding lists and grant directories, giving you click through to 100k grant funders. And because many of the online funding lists have been created by fundraising professionals, you don't have to create your own, so it saves you time too. Watch the 3 min Demo Video to find out how it will help you secure more funding.
Most of us aren't fundraising professionals, almost everyone has limited time, some find using technology challenging and, for others, English is a second language. Charity Excellence Funding Finder grants directory was designed specifically to be very quick and simple to use. All you need to do is watch the 3 min Demo Video and it also has links to Charity Excellence fundraising guides and videos to help you make your charitable grant funding bid applications successful.
The first step is to set the geographical parameters you want. The system can search Internationally, UK Wide, for each UK country, major cities and, for England, counties. Select all the geographical settings relevant to your charity to maximise your charitable grants search. You can also search for other locations in the Key Word search box. However, there are 1000 plus towns in the UK, so it's worth trying but is a bit of a lucky dip.
These are the search categories from the People & Groups pull down menu. The more you select, the more grants Funding Finder will display.
| Animals | Food | Small Charities |
| BAME | Homeless | Social Enterprise & CICs |
| Bid Writers | Infrastructure Charities | Start Ups |
| Community Groups & Clubs | Less Popular Causes | Veterans |
| Disability | LGBTQI+ | Women |
| Faith | Young People |
The paid for grants directories generally, don't really cater for smaller charities because you often can't afford to pay them. You don't pay us, so we work hard to support our smaller groups, because you make up 95% of the sector and we know how hard it is to compete against the larger charities.
These are the search categories from the Sector & Type pull down menu. The more you select, the more grants Funding Finder will display.
| Arts & Heritage | Funding Finder | Multi Year Funding |
| Buildings & Equipment | General Funding | Research |
| Core Funding | Health & Wellbeing | Social Welfare & Poverty |
| Education& Training | Humanitarian | Sport & Leisure |
| Environment | Justice | Tech |
You can filter the charity grant funding displayed by selecting grant amount and also be using the Any or All Categories pull down menu. The system default is 'Any'. That is, if you select more than one of the options above, the system will display charity funding from grant makers that meet any of the criteria you have chosen. Howeve3r, if you use the pull down menu to choose 'All', the system will only display charity funding from grant makers that meet all of the criteria you have chosen. Your search will return less charitable grants but these will be a better fit for what you are looking for.
You can use the Key Word search box to find very local charitable grants and more niche types of charity funding.
To find a charity funding bid writer, login to the free Funding Finder grants directory, enter your locations requirements and select Bid Writer from the People & Groups menu. If you're an experienced bd writer, you can apply for your details to be added to Funding Finder for a small fee.
We make too many mistakes of our own to wish to or feel able to judge others. However, as part of our ethical commitment, where a reasonable number of our community have ethical concerns about the products/services sold by a company, or related grant maker, we include an ethics note. For example, cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, military equipment or fossil fuels. You can find more detail in our ethics policy.
We cannot make grant makers follow best practice but we can alert our community to those who do. In 2025, we carried out our first annual survey of grant makers. Charities were invited to rate the well known 50 UK grant makers (for quality of information and how good their grant making process is) and also to nominate the best grant making team for our People's Choice Award.
The winners were the Garfield Weston Foundation and Lloyds Bank Foundation Foundation E&W respectively. Thank you for showing others how good (and effective) grant making can be. We have included the ratings for the best of the grant makers in Funding Finder.
You can fund more details of our survey and how we ran it on our grant makers survey page.
A registered charity ourselves, we provide 8 online health checks, the huge information hub, Quality Mark and 2 other directories.
Quick, simple and very effective. Nearly half our ratings are 10/10.
Find Funding, Free Help & Resources - Everything Is Free.
Make Sure You Stay Safe Online
We would never knowingly link to any website that contains offensive, illegal or suspect information, or potentially scam links and we carry out checks as best we can. However, our system links charities not only to help but also websites with online lists of links and other databases and a volunteer run charity, can't possibly check and validate everything. Consequently, in using our system you accept that we cannot take any responsibility for 3rd party content or links and you agree that you will carry out all reasonable checks to keep yourself safe. Here's our guide to staying safe online.
In the event you ever come across something that concerns you, please inform us immediately - ian@charityexcellence.co.uk.
No grant application is guaranteed, but you can improve your chances by ensuring you meet the funder’s eligibility criteria and priorities, engaging with the grant maker where possible, and submitting a clear, concise application that is compelling, evidence‑based and demonstrates urgency and impact.
A. Smaller grants often have faster turnaround times, but many funders assess applications quarterly or annually, so it is important to check decision schedules and focus on those with upcoming deadlines.
A. Core cost funding, sometimes called unrestricted funding, supports a charity’s running costs such as salaries, rent and overheads, rather than being restricted to a specific project.
Most charitable funders only make grants for exclusively charitable purposes and usually require organisations to be formally constituted and have a bank account in the organisation’s name.
A. An increasing number of charitable funders will consider applications from CICs, although additional conditions may apply, such as governance requirements or limits on the distribution of profits.
A. The most effective way to find grant funding is by using a grants directory, ideally a free one such as the Charity Excellence Funding Finder, alongside signing up for funding alerts and contacting your local council or community foundation.
A. Grants for specific sectors are best found through a grants directory such as the Charity Excellence Funding Finder, combined with relevant national bodies (for example Arts Council England or Sport England) and local councils, community foundations or CVS organisations.
Many grants databases charge fees, but some major funders, such as the National Lottery, offer free searches of their funding, and the Charity Excellence Funding Finder is a free service that also connects users to other free funding directories.
