Federal & State Grants

Surface relevant federal funding opportunities from Grants.gov , scored against your mission, then add the good ones to your Grant Tracker pipeline. (This extension was previously called “Federal Grants”.)

Who this is for: admins and fundraising staff in an org with the Federal & State Grants extension enabled. The Grants.gov public API is free to use.

This extension finds opportunities. It does not administer awards. There is no drawdown, federal financial report, subrecipient, indirect-cost or period-of-performance tracking here — those are not part of CartonCrew. What this does is discovery, scoring, and a hand-off into Grant Tracker.

What’s here

The discovery feed

The feed opens on three tabs:

• Active — everything currently matched.
• Updated — matches whose details have changed since you last looked.
• Dismissed — the ones you have set aside.

Updated is a flag, not a state of its own. An opportunity on the Updated tab is still active; it is simply one whose tracked fields moved.

Above the list, a sort (Relevance, Deadline or Award amount), a category filter starting at All categories, and a Min score slider. The header shows either Last synced with a date, or Not yet synced.

Each opportunity card carries its relevance score as a badge — hover it to see how that score was reached, broken down across category, keywords and CFDA — the agency, the award range, and a deadline chip counting down (or reporting how many days overdue it is).

With nothing matched yet the feed says: “No opportunities — Configure funding filters in Settings → Federal & State Grants, then run a sync.”

What you can do with a card

• Add to Pipeline — see below.
• View on Grants.gov — opens the original posting.
• Dismiss — opens Dismiss opportunity, where you pick a reason: Not eligible, Already funded, Out of scope, Award too small or Other. Choosing Other reveals a free-text note.
• Restore — on a dismissed card, puts it back.
• Updated — on a changed card, opens What changed, a table of the fields that moved and their current values.

Mark as reviewed, in the What changed window, closes the window for this session only. It does not record anything. The Updated flag clears on its own — when the opportunity stops changing, or when you add it to your pipeline.

Running a sync

The sync runs daily once you have enabled it in settings. Admins can also click Run sync now at any time, which reports its progress as it goes (fetched, updated, tenants, matches) and finishes with a count of matches.

Adding an opportunity to your pipeline

Click Add to Pipeline on the card. This requires the Grant Tracker extension: without it the button is disabled and reads “Enable Grant Tracker to push” on hover, and the server refuses the same request with “Enable the Grant Tracker extension to push opportunities into your pipeline.”

What arrives in Grant Tracker is fixed, not chosen:

• the grant lands in the Prospect stage
• Amount requested is taken from the opportunity’s award ceiling
• Application deadline is taken from its closing date
• its deadline reminders are generated straight away

Adjust any of it afterwards on the grant’s Overview tab. Pushing the same opportunity twice is harmless — the card changes to ✓ In pipeline, which links to the grant.

Settings → Federal & State Grants

Only admins can change these. Everyone else sees them read-only.

Enable daily discovery sync turns the automatic run on.

Funding categories — a grid of the 22 Grants.gov categories, each shown with its code:

Agriculture · Arts · Business & Commerce · Community Development · Consumer Protection · Disaster Prevention & Relief · Education · Employment, Labor & Training · Energy · Environment · Food & Nutrition · Health · Housing · Humanities · Information & Statistics · Income Security & Social Services · Law, Justice & Legal Services · Natural Resources · Regional Development · Science & Technology / R&D · Transportation · Other

Select all and Clear all toggle the lot.

Three more filters, each taking a list of entries:

• CFDA / ALN numbers — Assistance Listing numbers, e.g. 84.215
• Keyword phrases — e.g. youth literacy
• Agencies (optional) — by agency code

Scoring weights

Category %, Keyword % and CFDA % decide how much each kind of match contributes to an opportunity’s score.

The three weights must total exactly 100. The page will not let you save otherwise — it shows the running total and the message “Weights must total 100 to save.” — and the server enforces the same rule independently, so a second browser tab cannot slip a bad total past it.

Minimum relevance score sets the floor below which a match is not kept at all. That is a different control from the Min score slider on the feed, which only hides matches you have already collected.

Your grant sources

Track the funding sources you check by hand — family foundations, state grant portals, newsletters — alongside the automated feed: “Foundations, state portals, newsletters — the places you check for funding beyond the automated Grants.gov sync.”

Admins can Add source (a name, and optionally a link), Edit one inline, or remove one with ✕, which asks for confirmation first. Links must be regular http(s) URLs.

These are reference entries for your team. They do not feed the automated matching — the discovery feed still pulls from Grants.gov only.

Exporting

Export (choose CSV or Excel) exports the matched set as you have it filtered, with the score, title, agency, deadline, award range, categories, CFDA numbers, status and whether each is already in your pipeline. With the Cloud Drive extension connected, a second button saves the same export to your drive.

Planned

Automated syncing from state / local sources (including Socrata open-data portals) into the discovery feed is a planned enhancement. Today the automated feed is Grants.gov only; state and local sources are tracked by hand in Your grant sources.

Last updated: 2026-09-15 · Applies to: CartonCrew v1.563+