Welcome to Eye on FDO! I'm Dave Clark, the Foundation Center's manager of online subscription services. As the official blog of Foundation Directory Online, Eye on FDO will serve as a platform for communication between myself and the FDO community. I'll keep you up to date on all the latest happenings and help you take full advantage of all FDO has to offer.
If you've been an FDO subscriber for even a short length of time, you know that feedback is extremely important to us. After all, our goal is to enhance FDO based on what we hear from you. In that spirit, I encourage you to post comments to my blog entries and make suggestions for improving Foundation Directory Online. Just click the Comments link below any of my posts to reply.
Eye on FDO isn't our first interactive vehicle for communicating with subscribers, and probably won't be our last, but I do think it will help us to share information with you quicker and more frequently than ever before. With that in mind, be sure to visit often to stay current on everything FDO.
Thanks, and welcome!
Thanks, Sheryl. Remember, you can always access the Grantmaker Name index to view a list of all grantmakers in the database. Just click the View Index link located beneath the Grantmaker Name search field title. Furthermore, selecting a name from the index, as opposed to typing it directly into the search field, will eliminate any chance for error.
Posted by: Dave Clark | May 01, 2008 at 09:42 AM
I am not sure how to articulate this but it would be helpful if the results could be more flexible, not in terms of spelling specifically, but in how something is typed. For example, I was looking for the Oppenheimer Funds Legacy Program and nothing I tried would get any hits. I did not know that OppenheimerFunds is written as one word. Once I found that out elsewhere, I was able to get results. The same thing happens if the word "the" in the funder name is typed or not typed, or sometimes how initials are typed (with or without spaces and periods). I hope this is being clearer than mud. Thank you.
Posted by: Sheryl Kaplan | May 01, 2008 at 12:56 AM
I've used other services before but Foundation Center is new to me and JUST as explicit in what it wants in order to come up with a managable result. Frustrating! I know practice makes perfect, so here I go!
Posted by: Becki | April 30, 2008 at 12:55 PM
Annie, thanks for your suggestion. Incorporating some of the grantmaker-related search options into the Search Grants interface is indeed something that we've been thinking about.
Posted by: Dave Clark | April 29, 2008 at 09:59 AM
It sure would be helpful to have the same check box to "Exclude grantmakers not accepting applications" for grant searches like you do for grantmaker searches. Is that possible?
Posted by: Annie | April 28, 2008 at 07:29 PM
Joan, I would suggest consulting our Online Librarian. You can submit your question via e-mail or initiate a live chat.
Posted by: Dave Clark | April 25, 2008 at 05:01 PM
Hello - I'm new to fundraising. Is it appropropritate to follow up a written grant request? How? by telephone? by letter?
Thanks!
Posted by: Joan | April 25, 2008 at 04:36 PM
Greg, you can subscribe to this blog's feed by adding one of the following URLs to the feed reader of your choice:
http://eyeonfdo.foundationcenter.org/index.rdf
http://eyeonfdo.foundationcenter.org/rss.xml
http://eyeonfdo.foundationcenter.org/atom.xml
Another option is to subscribe using your web browser, if the browser you are using supports this functionality.
Posted by: Dave Clark | April 17, 2008 at 06:57 PM
Hello. Happy to see this latest effort. Could you please add an RSS feed so readers can subscribe and be automatically updated on new posts? Should be simple enough with a Typepad blog. Thanks.
Posted by: Greg Cannon | April 17, 2008 at 04:35 PM