Opportunity Discovery

Opportunity Discovery replaces the routine of checking a dozen separate sites and mailing lists with a single feed. Instead of a staff member visiting a federal grants portal, a state agency site, several foundation directories, and a handful of corporate giving pages on a recurring basis, source connectors pull current listings from all of those categories into one place on a scheduled interval.

The feed is organized by category, geography, and funding type, matched against a saved search profile that staff define for their organization's program areas. When a source posts a new opportunity that matches the profile, it appears in the feed automatically. This does not mean every listing is relevant; it means staff are reviewing a filtered set of candidates instead of raw source pages, and are reviewing them once regardless of how many source lists carried the listing.

Duplication is a real problem in funding research: the same federal opportunity can appear in more than one aggregator, and a foundation's own site can post the same program the discovery feed already surfaced from a directory. Deduplication logic matches on funder name, program title, and deadline to collapse these into a single feed entry, so staff are not reviewing the same opportunity twice under different headlines.

Every listing in the feed shows when it was last checked against its original source. This freshness marker exists because funding listings change: deadlines move, award amounts are revised, and notices are sometimes withdrawn. A listing that has not been re-checked recently is visibly flagged as such, rather than presented with the same confidence as one checked that day.

Discovery does not make a pursue decision and does not hand anything to drafting or submission on its own. Its output is a reviewed, deduplicated, categorized feed. The decision to move a specific opportunity into eligibility scoring, and from there into a draft, is made by a staff member acting on what the feed surfaces.