As featured in
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£240,000
Biggest grant won using Raiser so far
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£0
What it costs your charity. Now and always.
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Raiser
Built by fundraisers, for fundraisers
Hunting for grants is exhausting. And the databases aren’t helping.
You know there’s funding out there for your charity. The problem is finding it.
You search Google. You ask around. You get a tip at a networking event and spend two hours trying to work out from a foundation’s website whether they fund anything like what you do. You pay for a database subscription you can’t really afford, discover it’s out of date, cancel it. You bookmark things you never go back to.
And all of this happens before you’ve written a single word of a single application.
But here’s the thing that rarely gets said: a lot of grant databases are actively making this worse.
Every week you’ll see platforms post something like: “139 new funds added to our database this week.” As if that’s a good thing. As if the problem is that there aren’t enough entries to wade through.
It isn’t. You don’t need more entries. You need better ones.
Adding a funder’s name and website to a spreadsheet isn’t hard. Anyone can do it in an afternoon. What’s hard is knowing whether they’re still active, whether they fund organisations like yours, what the application experience is actually like, and whether they’ve given to anything recently. That takes a real person, at a real charity, who has actually done the work of finding and prospecting that funder.
That’s exactly how Raiser’s database is built.
A funding database where every entry earned its place.
Raiser’s funder database isn’t built by a team importing bulk data from Companies House. It’s built by the charity sector itself — by the fundraisers who are out there finding funders every day, and sharing what they find.
Every entry in Raiser’s database was added by a real person at a real charity — someone who found that funder, looked into them, and thought other charities should know about them. Not a web scrape. Not a data dump. A person who did the work.
It works like Wikipedia — but for fundraising. Every funder record shows you who added it and when. Who has updated it since. Whether other fundraisers have verified it. The history is there. The community is visible. If something changes — a funder closes, changes their priorities, updates their application process — someone who’s been there will flag it.
No entry gets in unchecked. When you add a funder to Raiser, you can keep it private — just for your own use — or share it to the central database. If you share it, it goes through a lightweight peer-review process. Someone else in the community confirms it. The entry gets a contributor record. Nobody’s taking a bulk upload of 50,000 stale entries and calling it a database.
Find funders that actually match your work. Search by cause area, geography, grant size, and funding type. See what other fundraisers in your field have found. Build a shortlist that’s relevant to your organisation — not a generic list designed for charities ten times your size.
Add what you find. Help someone else. When you come across a funder that isn’t in the directory, add them. You’ll get the credit — and so will every other small charity who would otherwise have spent hours finding what you already know.
Funder database — contributor history, filters, and verification (coming soon)
Find your first match in under ten minutes.
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Tell us about your charity
Answer a few questions about your work, your cause area, and the communities you serve. We use this to surface the most relevant funders first — not everything in the database, but the ones most likely to fund work like yours.
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Search, filter, and shortlist
Browse with filters that actually make sense — cause area, geography, grant size, application style. Each funder record shows you who found it, when it was last verified, and what other fundraisers know about it.
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Add what you know
Found a funder we don’t have? Add them in under a minute. Decide whether to keep it private or share it with the community. Either way, it’s in your pipeline and working for you.
Funder search and pipeline — filters and shortlist (coming soon)
Charities already finding and winning funding with Raiser
£5,000
Raised from a local funder
“I didn't think I could get a bid in on time, but Raiser made it possible. Having all of our previous material in one place, plus the fundraising expertise baked in, meant we could quickly and simply put our request to the funder — and it worked!”
Mark Hornsey, Co-Artistic Director, Babbling Vagabonds
£240,000
Core grant over two years
“We're now seeing a massive increase in our capacity to win funding. We're celebrating a big win recently — a £240,000 core grant award over 2 years, written using the Raiser approach.”
Simon Wallwork, CEO, Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust
£10,000
National Lottery Heritage Fund
“We used Raiser to help bring together the school, the church, and the PTA for a project marking the school's 150th anniversary. We ended up securing £10,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.”
PTA Member (name changed for privacy), Primary School PTA
Even the funders think the old way is broken.
“As a trust-based funder and champion of grassroots and small charities, I feel frustrated by the funder-fuelled norms of application processes and impact reporting. Raiser is a much needed leveller and has the potential to reform an inequitable system that gets in the way of facilitating brilliant, impactful work.”
Kate Symondson
The Symondson Foundation
The sector’s best funding directory. Free. Built properly.
Other grants databases charge for access and compete on size. Raiser competes on quality. And because it’s community-maintained — built by fundraisers doing real work, not a team adding bulk entries — it stays current in a way no editorial team ever could.
Raiser is completely free for charities. No trial. No card. No small print.
We make money when funders use our platform to give — which means our incentives are exactly where they should be: getting more money to charities doing great work.
Here’s what you get, free, from day one:
- Access to Raiser’s community funder database — quality-verified, contributor-attributed, always growing
- The ability to add funders and help the whole sector benefit
- Your full Impact Story™ — unlimited
- Grant pipeline and deadline tracking — unlimited
- Built-in writing support for bids and reports
- Updates, improvements, and new features as we build them
Questions we get a lot
How is this different from other grant databases?
Most databases optimise for the number of entries — they import in bulk and measure success by how many funders they've listed. We don't. Every entry in Raiser's database was added by a fundraiser who actually found and used that funder. Every entry has a contribution history. Quality over quantity, at every step.
How many funders are in the database?
We deliberately don't lead with that number. The size of the database is less important than whether the funders in it are relevant to you, current, and verified by people doing real fundraising work. It grows every week — with entries that earned their place.
What if a funder I know isn't in there?
Add them. It takes about a minute, and you immediately make that funder discoverable for every other charity on Raiser. You'll get the credit, and other fundraisers will be able to build on what you found.
Can I keep my finds private?
Yes. When you add a funder, you can choose to keep it just for your own pipeline, or share it to the community database. You're always in control.
Is this just a list of funders, or is there more to Raiser?
Much more. The funder database is one part of a free fundraising service that also includes an Impact Story™ builder, a grant pipeline manager, and built-in writing support for bids and reports.
Is this actually free? What's the catch?
No catch. Raiser is free for charities because we believe the burden of fundraising admin should shift off your shoulders. We're paid by the funders using our platform to find and fund high impact causes like yours!
Still have questions? Email us at hello@raiser.uk — we actually reply.
The more fundraisers who share what they find, the better it gets for everyone.
The reason grant hunting is so hard is that the knowledge has always been fragmented — in people’s heads, shared informally at events, locked in expensive subscriptions, or just not written down at all.
Raiser is changing that. Not by scraping the internet and calling it a database. By building something where real fundraising knowledge gets shared, attributed, and kept current — by the people who have it.
When you join and add what you know, you’re not just getting access to what’s already there. You’re making it better for the person who searches after you.