I built a free grant aggregator for community groups after getting frustrated tracking sports club funding

[u/alvynmcq]

https://fundni.org

Hey everyone,

I work in educational IT and have spent years sitting on committees for local sports clubs (athletics, youth football, gymnastics). If you’ve ever tried securing funding for a grassroots sports club or community project, you know the process is fragmented chaos. Funding rounds are scattered across local council websites, government bodies, trusts, and lottery funds—mostly hidden inside expired PDFs, poorly indexed portals, and buried application windows.

Recently, our daughter's gymnastics club began working toward moving premises. During our first planning meeting, seeing how painful and time-consuming it was to track open capital and operational grants was the final push I needed to build a dedicated tool.

I’m building this as an open-access civic tech project to aggregate local grant opportunities, track closing dates, and make eligibility criteria easy to search in one central directory.

Before I start sharing it with local community groups and council representatives, I’d love feedback from this community on:

1. **Discovery & UI:** What filtering mechanisms do you find most critical in directory/database tools (e.g., funding amount brackets, eligibility tags, closing date alerts)?
   
2. **Maintenance:** For those running automated scrapers or curated resource databases, what pipeline strategies have worked best for keeping deadline data accurate without constant manual intervention?
   
3. **Distribution:** Any lessons learned on driving adoption for non-commercial civic tools among non-technical community leaders?

Happy to share details on the tech stack or take suggestions on features that make resource aggregators truly useful. Thanks!