The more you know about the people at the grantmakers, the better you can write your proposal. In finding information about individuals, you’ll use the same techniques as for institutions.

To state the obvious, start your research by looking up the person in a general search engine. Google (google.com), Yahoo! (yahoo.com), and Bing (bing.com) give excellent results for researching individuals. In a small unscientific test I conducted, searching for information on several people (well known and fairly unknown) returned about 80 to 90 percent identical returns. Try using more than one search engine so you don’t miss any important information. The differences usually show up in the first page.

Search.yippy.com clusters search results to help you sort through the hundreds of hits. Searching for “grants for teachers” groups the 257 hits into foundations (38), scholarships (20), technology (19), and other clusters. This will be especially helpful when you’re looking for information on a person: results will be grouped for Paul Smith (doctor), Paul Smith (writer), etc.

Additional information is readily available for corporate leaders. Both Google (google. com/finance) and Yahoo! (finance.yahoo.com) offer special directories where you can find out a corporate officer’s salary, stock holdings, and even what they do with those holdings—whether they cash them in or transfer them to someone or to a charity.

Civic or corporate leaders can also be researched through newspapers’ and trade magazines’ site searches to locate recent articles. Highbeam.com enables you to search on periodicals and corporate press releases (which will usually give you too many hits) or specific ones. This is a fee-based service, but Highbeam offers a free trial.

Need information on lawyers? Martindale (martindale.com) will give you their business address, area of practice, and the law school they graduated from. After you know what firm they work for, you might find that one of your board members knows someone in that firm, even if they don’t know a particular lawyer. An introduction can be made, and you’ve got a contact with a funder.

Need information on a doctor? Use the search engine for member doctors on the American Medical Association’s website (ama-assn.org).

Who’s Who has a long history of compiling biographical data on (according to their website) millions of people worldwide. Marquis is the publisher of the most comprehensive Who’s Who (marquiswhoswho.com). Use of their database is expensive, so this is another case where using the printed book at the library might be a better solution. If you’re really lucky, your library will subscribe to the online version.

The Cadillac of Internet search engines (for people and businesses) is LexisNexis (lexisnexis.com). This is a very expensive tool, but it does give you access, for example, to a database with information on some 200 million households and 700 million phone numbers gathered from 45,000 sources. You might be able to gain free access at business or academic libraries.

Don’t forget the telephone directory. Many years ago in one of my first jobs, I was given an intern’s project to complete. The intern had spent the entire summer looking for home addresses for a large number of prominent people. She had found most of them, but a dozen or so remained elusive. I found half of them listed in the Manhattan telephone directory. Just because they’re rich and famous doesn’t mean they aren’t listed.

WhitePages.com, Yahoo!, and other search engines offer free national online telephone directories. Search results will usually return a complete address as well as the phone number.

If an address is in the telephone book (online or offline), you should feel free to use it for your mailing list. This is public knowledge, after all. But you’ll want to tread carefully; you don’t want to end up alienating a prospect rather than cultivating one.

Other charities offer prospect information for you online in the form of donor acknowledgment lists. Occasionally, someone’s name in a donor list will come up in a general search engine search. Check out the competition’s websites for program and GOS funders. Comparing lists of two or more charities will reveal those funders supporting more than one—an excellent indication that they might support your charity, too.