Set up your account

1. Sign up

Head to grantmind.pro/signup and pick the plan that matches you. Nonprofits running grants in house should pick the direct plan; agencies and freelance grant consultants running multiple clients should pick the agency plan. If you pick the wrong one, settings can swap you over without losing data.

The 7-day free trial gives you the full product. A card is required at signup, but you can cancel anytime inside the trial without being charged.

2. Verify your email

Click the link in the verification email before you do anything else. A few features (deadline reminders, saved-search alerts, LOI PDF exports) silently disable themselves for unverified accounts to avoid sending mail to a bouncing address.

3. Fill out your org profile

This is the most important step. The profile drives every match score, every recommendation, and the AI's tone in drafts. Spend ten minutes here and the rest of the product gets sharper.

The fields that matter most:

• Mission statement: paste your real one, not a tagline. Two or three sentences is fine.
• Service area: cities, counties, states, or national. Without this, state-restricted grants flood your results.
• Populations served: who you actually work with, in plain language (e.g. “at-risk youth ages 12 to 18 in North Philadelphia”).
• Annual budget: rough is fine. Drives competitiveness scoring so the matcher doesn't hand a $250k-budget org grants designed for $20M operations.
• Programs: brief descriptions of the work, with dollar ranges where you can. Each program becomes a unit the matcher can score against.
• EIN and incorporation year: needed for federal grants (Grants.gov, SAM.gov) and for foundation due diligence.

If you have a website with most of this on the About page, the intake form has an “Extract from website” option that pre-fills the profile from your site copy. Review and edit before saving.

4. Run your first search

Once the profile is saved, head to Find a grant and try a natural-language query like “capacity-building grants for arts nonprofits in California under $50k.” The results will be matched and scored against your profile. Walk through the Searching for grants doc next.

Common stumbles

• Service area left blank: the matcher can't filter out state-only or county-only opportunities, so results look bad. Fix by adding your service area.
• Mission statement that's a slogan: the AI needs context, not branding. Replace “We change lives” with what you actually do.
• No programs entered: drafting falls back on the mission statement alone, which produces generic proposals. Add two or three programs and the drafts become specific.