Favor answers a deceptively simple question: of all the organizations a funder supports, how heavily are they leaning toward yours? It is one of the most useful and most underused metrics in nonprofit fundraising.
The intuition
Picture a foundation that split $5 million among forty different grantees last year. You received $150,000 of that. On the surface, you are just one of forty grantees. But given that the average grantee in the foundation's portfolio received $125,000, your $150,000 share is 1.2 times the typical grant. That is Favor, expressed numerically.
Favor compares your actual share of a foundation's grantmaking to a baseline of what you would receive if the funder distributed grants proportionally across all peer recipients. When Favor is high, the foundation is signaling preference. When Favor is low, you are either out of favor or underinvesting in the relationship, no matter how large the absolute grant amount looks.
Why share-of-wallet matters more
Development teams are trained to celebrate large absolute grants. Boards reward them. Annual reports memorialize them. But absolute grant size, untethered from the foundation's grantmaking capacity and patterns, hides the most actionable insight: whether you are the foundation's preferred destination in your program category.
The Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University Indianapolis has spent more than a decade documenting the concentration of philanthropic wealth among a small number of foundations and institutional funders. Their work makes clear that share-of-wallet, not grant size, is the dimension that predicts whether a relationship can scale to a transformational level. The capacity is often just waiting to be unlocked.
What fundraisers do with Favor
High-Favor foundations are your defendable expansion targets. They have already revealed grantmaking preference. Asking them to lean further in is a different conversation, and a more answerable one, than cold-prospecting a foundation that has never funded your program area.
Low-Favor, high-capacity foundations are qualification targets. They could be granting you more, and the data shows they currently are not, but you do not yet know whether the gap is a relationship problem, a program-fit problem, or a positioning problem. Favor identifies the gap. Your fundraising professional's qualification conversation diagnoses it.
A note on data quality
Favor only works when the underlying recipient data is comprehensive. Aprize has developed its proprietary database from the largest and most complete sources of public data. We then structure, validate, and refresh that record on an ongoing basis.