A page for grant makers should answer what a program officer checks before inviting a proposal: your legal name and tax status with a way to verify them, what you do and where, the evidence behind your approach, how you report, and who to contact. Link to your filings and reports instead of paraphrasing them, and put a date on every figure.
Funders may read your website before a proposal arrives and again while it sits in review. The proposal follows their template. The website is the version you wrote for everyone, and a program officer who finds different numbers or a different program name on it now has a question to ask before a yes.
This is a content-planning question for development staff and executive directors. It is not tax, audit, or grants compliance advice, and your finance lead and counsel own every statement about status, filings, and registrations.
Start with what a funder can verify
Put the organization's exact legal name and EIN on the page, matching IRS records, along with any name you operate under. The IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search lets anyone "search for information about an organization's tax-exempt status and filings," including Form 990 series returns, Pub. 78 data, the automatic revocation list, and determination letters. A program officer may check there anyway, and matching names save a round of email.
Link your recent Form 990 filings and any audited statements you publish. The IRS says an exempt organization "must make available for public inspection its annual information return (e.g., Form 990, Form 990-EZ)," and that it is not required to provide a copy if it "has made that form publicly available," such as through internet posting, though in-person inspection still applies. Your accountant can confirm how that applies to you.
Governance answers come next. List the board with each member's professional affiliation and board role, and name the executive director and program leads with a sentence on what each oversees. A program officer reading that list is checking for independence and for the skills the proposal claims, so keep it current when terms end. If the board approves a multi-year plan or annual budget, say when it was last approved; the documents themselves can stay internal until a funder asks for them.
Federal funding adds registrations. Under 2 CFR 25.200, an applicant without an exemption under 2 CFR 25.110 must "Be registered in SAM.gov before submitting an application," must "Include its UEI in each application," and must "Maintain a current and active registration in SAM.gov at all times during which it has an active Federal award." If your page mentions federal grants, state your registration only when finance confirms it is current, and assign someone to recheck it.
Explain the approach so it can be checked
Funders compare your logic, not just your cause. Say what problem you work on, where, with whom, what you do, and why you expect that work to change something. A mission statement is not a theory of change. The first names a purpose, while the second explains the steps between activity and result and admits which links are still being tested.
Separate outputs from outcomes. Sessions held, acres treated, and meals served are outputs. Outcomes are what changed for people or places, measured over a stated period. Your program staff already know which counts are reliable and which are estimates, and the writer should not have to invent a result or round one up to make the page read better. Our page on publishing research and reports so they can be cited covers how to present evaluation findings with their limits.
A brief for the funder page
| Section | What it answers | Who confirms it |
|---|---|---|
| Who we are | Legal name, EIN, year founded, tax status, link to IRS search | Finance lead |
| Where we work | Counties, regions, or sites, with dates | Program director |
| Approach | Problem, method, the reasoning between them | Program director |
| Evidence | Outcome statements with source and period | Evaluation or program staff |
| Reporting | What you report, how often, and a sample if cleared | Grants manager |
| Financials | Links to filings and audited statements | Finance lead |
| Contact | The named role that handles funder inquiries | Executive director |
| Last reviewed | The date the whole page was checked | Page owner |
A fictional example: a watershed group's funder page
A fictional watershed council in Montana is preparing for a family foundation's spring cycle. Its current funder page says it "restores rivers and builds community" and shows six funder logos.
The rewrite opens with one paragraph: the council works on two named tributaries in one county, partners with landowners on streambank fencing and riparian planting, and monitors water temperature at fixed sites each summer. A table lists projects by year with linear feet fenced and the monitoring report each figure comes from. A short section explains what the council does not yet know, such as whether temperature gains hold through drought years. Links point to its last three Form 990 filings and its IRS search record, and a final line names the development director as the contact for funders.
Nothing in the rewrite is new information. All of it sat in grant reports and monitoring files, and the stewardship coordinator walked the writer through which figures were measured and which were estimated. When the material already exists, the writer should not have to invent a single number to make the page work. The page simply moved it to where a program officer would look.
Keep it current through the grant cycle
Funder pages decay quietly. A program ends, a partner changes, a registration lapses, and the page still says otherwise. Give the page one owner and a review date tied to your grant calendar. Before each major submission, the grants manager should ask the team, "Would a program officer who read our last proposal find the same numbers on our website today?" Fix whichever document is wrong.
Funders and their staff may also put questions about you to search tools and AI assistants. Our working hypothesis is that a page stating your status, place, method, and evidence in plain, dated sentences gives those tools accurate material to work from, though no page can control what an assistant says. If donors will read the same facts, our page on writing about where donations go covers the individual giver's version. The guide to finding unanswered buyer questions describes how to collect the questions funders actually ask.
Hudson South's four steps fit this page closely. The Authority Asset gathers approved knowledge and evidence, here the filings, evaluations, and cleared reports. Hudson Twenty-One records how the organization communicates across 21 dimensions so the page sounds like your program staff. Market Intelligence researches the questions funders in your field ask, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first content. Our nonprofit and association overview covers the disclosure topics behind this page.
Show funders the work before the proposal
Book a free 30-minute call and Hudson South will walk you through how your site reads next to the peer organizations your funders also review.
Get your free competitor analysisSources
- Tax Exempt Organization Search. Internal Revenue Service. Read 2026-10-16.
- Public disclosure and availability of exempt organization returns and applications: Public disclosure overview. Internal Revenue Service. Read 2026-10-16.
- 2 CFR 25.200: Requirements for notice of funding opportunities, regulations, and application instructions. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. Read 2026-10-16.