# Tool shows charities which funders have backed organisations like theirs

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2026/08/12/tool-shows-charities-which-funders-have-backed-organisations-like-theirs/
- Published: 2026-08-12T12:09:25+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**A free tool lets any UK charity see which funders have a track record of supporting
organisations like it. It draws on more than a million grants that funders have 
already published.**

Funder Map, launched on 31 July, asks a single question: **who funds charities like
yours?** A user types in a charity name or number and receives a report naming the
funders who back similar charities far more often than they back charities in general,
alongside the actual grants that led to each recommendation. The site currently 
covers England and Wales.

It is built from two public sources: grants data published by funders through [360Giving](https://fundraising.co.uk/tag/360giving/),
the UK’s open standard for grants information, and the [Charity Commission of England and Wales’](https://fundraising.co.uk/tag/charity-commission/)
register. Because it works from grants that were genuinely awarded rather than a
list of open calls, the tool “identifies funders that are demonstrably disposed 
to support a charity’s peers”. It first finds charities that share a charity’s funders
or are registered to do similar work, then explores and reports on the funders behind
them.

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**[Peter Brady](https://www.peterbrady.co.uk/)**, who built the tool, describes 
the tool’s approach as “deliberately restrained”. Funder Map ranks funders by how
far they are over-represented around similar charities, not by how many grants they
have made.

An early version ranked by volume and simply returned the country’s largest funders
to everyone, which Brady describes as “accurate but useless”.

The published version compares each funder’s presence around a charity’s peers against
its presence across the whole record, so a small trust with a clear pattern can 
outrank a large one without a clear pattern. Given the difficulties that trust fundraisers
face the tool is designed to be concise and transparent. For example, where no funder
meets the threshold, the report will say so rather than present padding with weak
suggestions.

## AI involvement?

Brady states that “No AI is involved at any point; every figure traces to a published
grant or register entry, and each recommendation links to its source”. Reports are
rebuilt live and can be shared via a link, copied or saved as a PDF. There is **
no sign-up, no paywall and no email capture, and nothing a user types is stored**,
according to Brady.

He commented on the value that [Funder Map](https://www.peterbrady.co.uk/funder-map/)
is designed to bring, saying:

> “Fundraisers spend a lot of time guessing which funders might be interested, and
> the honest answer is usually sitting in data that funders have already published.
> A free tool that overstates itself is worse than no tool.”

Nor is the tool designed to compete with existing trust funding research or application
directories. Brady positions Funder Map as a complement to application directories
rather than a replacement.

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