Identify Your Prospects
If you already use Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI assistant, you can connect it directly to Local News Catalyst's funder database. That gives you a permanent research connection — one you can come back to again and again to identify new funding opportunities and test ideas and get new insights using real grant data.
This page is for people who want to go further than the Funder Tool on its own allows: customizing the angle, exploring trends, or building an ongoing watchlist that fits how your station actually works.
What you're connecting to
The same dataset that powers the Funder Tool: five years of media-related grantmaking from across the country — tens of thousands of grants, each with the funder, recipient, amount, and date of support. The connection is read-only. Nothing your AI does on your end changes the underlying data, and nothing about your station, prompts, or conversations is sent back to Local News Catalyst.
Why connect your AI to a database at all
When you ask ChatGPT or Claude about funders today, it answers from general training data — which is months or years out of date and full of guesses. Connecting to a live database means the AI is reading the actual grant records when it answers you. Ask "which foundations have funded rural public radio in the last two years?" and instead of a plausible-sounding list, you get one grounded in real grants.
The technical name for this is MCP — Model Context Protocol — a standard way for AI assistants to query external data sources. You don't need to understand the protocol to use it. You set up the connection once, and from then on your AI knows it has the database available whenever a question calls for it.
A note on privacy and security
A few things worth knowing before you connect:
- The connection is read-only. Your AI can query the grant data; it cannot change it, and it has no access to anything else on the LNC site.
- Your conversations stay in your AI tool. What you ask Claude or ChatGPT is governed by their privacy policies, not ours. Review your AI provider's settings if you're discussing anything sensitive about your station.
- Treat AI output as a draft, not a final answer. Always verify a funder's current priorities and application requirements directly on their website before reaching out.
How to set it up
Pick the tool you use. The server URL is the same for all three:
https://lnc-funder-mcp.netlify.app/mcp
Claude (Pro, Team, or Enterprise)
- Go to Settings → Customize → Connectors
- Click + → Add custom connector
- Name it LNC Funder Database, paste the URL above, and click Add
- To use it in a conversation, click + → Connectors and toggle it on
ChatGPT (Plus, Pro, or Team)
- Go to Settings → Connectors (or Tools)
- Select Add connector → Custom
- Paste the URL above and save
Cursor, Windsurf, or other MCP-compatible editors
Add this to your MCP configuration file:
{
"mcpServers": {
"lnc-funder-db": {
"url": "https://lnc-funder-mcp.netlify.app/mcp"
}
}
}
Start here: build your own funder list
The most direct use is replicating what the Funder Tool does, but with full control over the framing. Once you have the connection set up, try a prompt along these lines (filling in your station's specifics):
Show prompt text
You are a grant research specialist for public media stations. Your task is
to build a funder prospect brief for the station below. Return your final
output as a single markdown-formatted response in this chat — not as a file
or attachment.
Station: [STATION CALLSIGN AND CITY — required]
Funding goals / priorities (optional): [describe what the station wants to
fund — e.g. local news expansion, educational programming, capital
equipment — or leave blank]
Tool: Use the Local News Catalyst funder database (the connected MCP tool
at lnc-funder-mcp.netlify.app) to pull foundation data. If that connector
isn't enabled in this conversation, tell me before you start anything else.
Your workflow:
1. Web search the licensee, service area, format, mission, programming, and
any recent relevant context about the station named above.
2. Use the Local News Catalyst funder database to extract foundations in
the same geographic region as the station.
3. For each relevant foundation, use web search and page fetches to find:
- Currently open funding opportunities
- Rolling application policies
- Whether the foundation accepts unsolicited grant requests
- Whether the foundation has previously funded this station (flag these
explicitly)
- Whether the foundation's opportunities align with the funding
priorities given above (if any)
4. Identify 20–25 candidate funders total — including funders beyond the
station's state that support stations with similar characteristics.
Rank the full candidate list by likelihood of funding this station,
using mission & funding priority alignment and past funding activity as
the primary ranking criteria. From this ranked list, select the top 20
for inclusion in the output. Check every application deadline against
today's date.
Organize the top 20 into four tiers:
- Tier 1 (funders 1–5): strong mission & funding priority alignment and
high likelihood of giving, no prior giving history with this station.
- Tier 2 (funders 6–13): state/regional funders with open application
paths and reasonable mission fit, no prior giving history with this
station.
- Tier 3 (funders 14–18): national funders with open application paths
aligned with the station's profile, no prior giving history with this
station.
- Tier 4 (funders 19–20): funders with a documented current or recent
funding relationship with this station. Research and report any open
opportunities for renewal or expanded giving.
Funder entry format:
- Markdown header with the funder name
- One sentence describing the funder's focus and relevance to this
station
- Organizations they've funded, with amounts, from the funder database
- A Current Opportunity line (rules below)
- A Prior Relationship flag: state explicitly whether this funder has
previously given to this station
Current Opportunity rules:
- Tier 1–3: report open opportunities only — these funders have no
prior relationship with the station.
- Tier 4: report open renewal or expansion opportunities; note the
prior relationship and most recent grant amount if available from the
funder database.
- Report what's open now or opening imminently: amount, deadline,
eligibility requirements, and a direct URL (or funder homepage if no
direct link exists).
- If nothing is currently open, say so plainly.
- Do not include the Public Media Bridge Fund or the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting (CPB).
- Do not suggest peer station introductions or third-party facilitation
as pathways.
- Where no warm pathway exists, say so — accuracy over optimism.
- Don't reference or link to the funder database tool itself in the
output.
Exclude entirely: closed-circle private foundations with no application
path, geographically restricted funders where the station is
ineligible, and benchmark-only entries.
5. While researching, give me brief progress updates (e.g., "Researching
funders — est. 3–4 min remaining"). When the brief is ready, output it
immediately — no "here's the brief" preamble.
6. Structure the final output in this order:
1. Title block — station callsign and city
2. Purpose of This Document
3. How to Use This List
4. Funder Tiers (Tier 1–4 as above)
5. Go deeper
6. AI Disclaimer
7. Sources
For the "Go deeper" section, use this text verbatim:
"Need to go deeper and identify more potential funders that could be a good
fit for your station? Local News Catalyst provides you with a couple of
options:
1. Connect your LLM (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) directly to Local News
Catalyst's funder database. That gives you a permanent research
connection — one you can come back to again and again to identify new
funding opportunities and test ideas and get new insights using real
grant data: https://localnewscatalyst.org/connect-to-funder-database/
2. Use Local News Catalyst's interactive dashboard to search manually for
aligned foundations. No LLM needed, just filter and find funders:
https://localnewscatalyst.org/resource/media-funders-recipients/"
For the AI Disclaimer, state clearly that this output was generated by an
AI system and may contain errors, omissions, or outdated information.
Emphasize that grant opportunities identified may have closed, changed
eligibility, or been discontinued since the time of research. Funder
priorities and application windows shift frequently — verify every
opportunity directly with the funder before investing staff time in an
application. This is a research starting point, not a verified funding
pipeline.
Be thorough but concise: one sentence per funder description. Prioritize
funders with demonstrated interest in journalism, media, education,
community programming, arts, or civic engagement. Cite sources for all
findings, including direct links to opportunities or funder homepages.
You're identifying likely funders, not instructing the station to apply to
any of them immediately. Total output must not exceed 1,500 words.
A few things this prompt does that a generic AI question won't:
- It anchors the AI in your actual context, not assumptions
- It explicitly asks the AI to use the database (you can usually tell whether it did by whether the funders feel specific and verifiable)
- It asks for organized output rather than a flat list — easier to act on
Going further with the same connection
Once the connection is set up, it stays. Here are some other ways stations have used live database access:
Spot funding trends
Ask the AI to look at year-over-year shifts in who's funding public media, or what kinds of work are getting funded more (or less). For example:
Which foundations have increased their media funding most over the last three years, and where is that growth concentrated geographically or topically?
Build a watchlist
Identify ten or fifteen funders worth tracking, and revisit the conversation every few months to see what they've funded since. The connection means the data is always current.
Here's my watchlist of fifteen funders. What have they each funded in the last two years that involves local journalism, rural communities, or public broadcasting? Flag anything that looks newly active.
Learn from peers
Pull the funding history of a few stations you consider peers and look for patterns: who funds them, at what amounts, and how often. This is often more revealing than a generic search.
Pull the grants received by Station A, Station B, and Station C over the last five years. What funders show up across more than one of them, and what does the typical grant size look like?
Prepare for a funder meeting
Before a call with a program officer, pull what their foundation has funded recently to ground your conversation in their actual priorities rather than their stated ones.
Show me the last twenty media grants made by the [Foundation Name]. What patterns do you see in size, geography, and recipient type? What questions should I be prepared for if I'm pitching them?
When you're ready to write
Identifying funders is step one. When you're ready to approach them, we have tools to help you build a letter of inquiry or develop a full application — both grounded in the same kind of station-specific data.
Go to the Secure New Grants page to develop the materials you need.