A popular European guidebook series refers to words that appear to be cognates but aren’t (the Italian caldo looks like it would mean “cold,” when it really means “hot”) as “false friends.” Funders make a lot of grants that are the grant writer’s false friends. These sometimes come under the heading of discretionary grants in their annual report.

Discretionary grants enable trustees to support charities they care about but that lie outside the foundation’s guidelines. It’s sometimes seen as a perk for trustees. In family foundations, it can be a means of keeping the peace when family members’ interests vary. Don’t let them mislead you. They do not indicate an area of interest for the foundation. Unless you know which trustee made the discretionary grant and have a connection to him or her, this will be a dead end in your grant search.

False leads also show up in donor listings. I once noticed a familiar foundation in an opera company’s donor list in the $25,000 category. But while checking out the foundation’s grants listing, I saw that this was the only opera company the funder supported and it seldom made grants over $5,000. How can this be explained? Checking the trustee lists revealed a common person on both the foundation and opera boards. This was a discretionary grant, not a new direction for the foundation.

Well-intentioned volunteers and your board of trustees might feed you false leads. When periodicals from Forbes to the Chronicle of Philanthropy publish their lists of the richest or most generous people, people who are not professional fundraisers are apt to suggest you target some of them.

If your charity already has a relationship with one of the people on the list or one of them has a foundation that supports organizations like yours in your geographic location, he might well be a very good prospect—otherwise, pursuing him will be a waste of time. Wealth is not an indication of a good prospect, but involvement with your charity (or a similar one) is.