![[ad] The Great Fundraising Masterclass, Revolutionise. Dublin and London, September 2026](https://fundraising.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Banner-Ad-728x90-1.png.webp)
Tool shows charities which funders have backed organisations like theirs
Howard Lake | 12 August 2026 | News
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, the UK’s open standard for grants information, and the Charity Commission of England and Wales’ 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.
Advertisement
![[ad] The Great Fundraising Masterclass, Revolutionise. Dublin and London, September 2026](https://fundraising.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/GFM-Series-26-UKF.png.webp)
Peter Brady, 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 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.
- Start-up Raiser launched to help small charities raise more funds (1 October 2025)
- Funding opportunities in May 2026 (29 May 2026)
- Applications open for JustGiving’s 2027 digital learning grants (15 July 2026)
Related posts
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.