New Grantsfire Feed for The Energy Foundation!

Grantsfire made great progress this week by setting up a feed that populates The Energy Foundation’s grants information to the Grantsfire website.

Check out The Energy Foundation’s grants here: http://grantsfire.org/grant/search?q=energy+foundation&by=grantor&s.x=0&s.y=0

The work to make this happen entailed the mark up in hgrant of the grants data to be aggregated by Grantsfire. The Energy Foundation grants data goes back 3 years and updates every 24 hours. Additional plans includes the incorporation of Geo Focus information in the next month.

The design of the grants feed allows for re-purposing so that other grantmakers interested in using PHP benefit from this effort with The Energy Foundation. This further assists Grantsfire efforts of getting feeds up and running quickly. Grantsfire plans to take the same approach for .NET and its users as well.

You can check out the feed here - http://hgrants.ef.org/

To learn more about The Energy Foundation, check out their website at: http://www.ef.org/home.cfm

To expand the power of grant making and extend your Foundation’s reach by publishing your grants information, contact Grantsfire at: http://www.grantsfire.org/cms/publish

John S.

Grantsfire Revolutionizes Grant Reporting

New project makes publishing and sharing grants information easier for foundations and nonprofits.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, (PRWeb) March 25, 2009 – Grantsfire, a project of Solpath, has received a $150,000 grant from The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to support the development and promotion of Grantsfire, a web-based system that aggregates and publishes grants information using Web 2.0 tools and technology.

Outreach

“Grantsfire’s success depends on the participation of grantmakers themselves. We hope to generate as much support for this project and establish as many partnerships throughout the nonprofit and philanthropic community as possible,” says Jason Ricci, Solpath’s Executive Director.

Over the next 90 days, Solpath will embark on an extensive outreach campaign to the grantmaking community to encourage participation in the Grantsfire project. By leveraging multiple online communications channels, Grantsfire seeks participants interested in publishing their grants information utilizing the innovative, standardized and simple hgrant format.

Grantsfire will change the way grants are reported and how fundraising research is conducted. Using web 2.0 principles of openness, interoperability, and collaboration, Grantsfire will make grants information available to anyone through a search engine at http://grantsfire.org and APIs that will allow anyone to build mashups using Grantsfire data.

Web 2.0 principles have already transformed the technology sector. By applying these same principles to how foundations track and report their grants, Grantsfire aims to help nonprofits fundraise more efficiently in a time when funds are fewer and needs are greater. Grantsfire will ultimately reduce costs while increasing the timeliness and accessibility of grants data collection.

About Grantsfire

Grantsfire (www.grantsfire.org) makes up-to-date information on philanthropic grants widely and easily accessible through a network-centric strategy. Grantsfire pulls recently published grants information from foundation website feeds according to a simple unified standard called hgrant. Grants data is pooled, and the collective data is then searchable and publishable by key words and other sort criteria. Ultimately, Grantsfire will bring down costs and increase the timeliness and accessibility of grants data collection.

About Solpath

Solpath (www.solpath.org) is an organization created specifically to develop solutions that improve foundation grants management processes and software systems. Solpath is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California.

• Read our Blog: http://www.solpath.wordpress.com
• Follow us: http://www.twitter.com/solpath

About Mott Foundation

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, established in 1926 in Flint, Michigan, by an automotive pioneer, is a private philanthropy committed to supporting projects that promote a just, equitable and sustainable society. It supports nonprofit programs throughout the U.S. and, on a limited geographic basis, internationally. Grantmaking is focused in four programs: Civil Society, Environment, Flint Area and Pathways Out of Poverty. Besides Flint, offices are located in metropolitan Detroit, Johannesburg (South Africa) and London. The Foundation, with year-end assets of approximately $1.96 billion, made 558 grants totaling $110.4 million in 2008. For more information, visit www.mott.org.

Contact:

Jason Ricci

Executive Director, Solpath

415.860.6326

jason@solpath.org

Grantsfire: New Developments.

After our first full month of new activity on Grantsfire, we are moving right along.

Development has been very focused on building new features and functionality for Grantsfire. Here are a few that have been keeping Casey busy.

• Grants Feed Validation Console
• Feed Analysis, Diagnostics and Alerts
• Outbound RSS
• Documentation

That’s not all though. We are actively recruiting additional Foundations interested in participating in Grantsfire. With 8 funders currently, we are pursuing 8 additional Foundations interested in publishing their grants information over the next few months.

We welcome your inquiries about how you can publish your grants information, from your web site, in a format that GrantsFire can easily aggregate. Check out our frequently asked questions here: http://www.grantsfire.org/cms/faq. Or, be in touch at grantsfire.org and we will tell you in very user-friendly detail how you can participate.

John S.

Grantsfire is moving fast!

A lot is happening really quickly on Grantsfire. Three weeks in and we have a dynamic and active list of goals and accomplishments to date.

First and foremost, we have gotten great feedback from the Grantsfire Working Email Distribution List. Many have offered great insight and encouragement along with excellent ideas. On top of this, many are willing to help implement these great ideas. If you are interested in sharing, learning, and contributing to the Grantsfire initiative, participate on this list by signing up here: http://lists.grantsfire.org/mailman/listinfo/working

Here are some other activities we are moving forward with. Some are completed and others are in progress.

• Infrastructure

With the help of Eugene, Eugene Eric and Jason, we have gotten much closer to centralizing all things Solpath and Grantsfire. We have also been busy documenting how we use this information.

• Outreach

We are aggressively preparing our outreach campaign. This will provide an update on our initial funding, current Grantsfire progress and the goals we WILL accomplish in the next few months.

• Development

To help reach these goals, we have a new Lead Developer. Casey West is on Grantsfire now and has jumped right in. He is working with Jason on a list of items related to the Grantsfire Aggregator. These include, among other things, a new hgrant feed validator, outgoing RSS and advanced functions to assist foundations in the management of their feeds.

With no shortage of activities and momentum right now, I am really enjoying my work with Solpath and Grantsfire. Since it has been some time since I could say this about my work, it is a pleasure to be engaged.

If you are interested in learning more about Grantsfire, check out www.grantsfire.org and keep following us here.

John S.

Another Solpath Evangelist…

Hello Grantmaking World!

My name is John Soulsby, I live in San Francisco, CA and have just started working with Jason Ricci, Eugene Eric Kim and Eugene Chan on Solpath and Grantsfire. With a background in various web-based technologies and projects, I am very excited to be involved with a Nonprofit that is leveraging Web 2.0, in its various forms, as a primary vehicle for outreach and achieving its Mission.

First of all, these guys are brilliant. They have set out on a tremendous effort to develop solutions that improve foundation grants management processes, software systems and information access. I get to be a part of this exciting journey by contributing to community outreach through this blog, Twitter and, our old stand-by, email. As well, I will help ensure we stay on top of critical tasks and evangelize the Solpath and Grantsfire messages of improved grants solutions and transparent access to grants information in a standardized format. Speaking of Grantsfire (www.grantsfire.org) and formats, let me get a plug in.

GrantsFire is a searchable database of grants that is compiled in real-time from information published by grantmakers. Our database is up-to-date and easy to use. Grantmakers can add their information by publishing their grants information in a simple, HTML-based format called hGrant.

So there you have it. With much to do, and happy for it, let’s get started.

Feel free to offer your insights here or follow us on Twitter@ http://twitter.com/solpath.

John S.