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How do I verify the legal status of individual organizations or nonprofits?
One of the most difficult challenges I face as a donor is finding the right nonprofits to donate. There are just one too many nonprofits to donate to. I will like my donations to be used for the right causes but how does one know when a charity is genuine from a pool of so many. I don’t believe social media pages are enough to make a good decision when it comes to nonprofit verification.
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5 Replies
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You can easily check a number of things online: 1) incorporation using the Secretary of State business lookup tool for the organization’s HQ state. 2) exempt status with the IRS: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/search-for-tax-exempt-organizations. 3) financials through https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/. 4) “transparency” rating through https://candid.org/ 5) BBB complaints in general or their charity profile in particular https://give.org/. Not all worthy nonprofits have information in the last three, but the first two are gold.
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This has been an issue for me too. Thank you for sharing.
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Thank you Sara for the response and suggestions. I will definitely look them up.
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It is so hard to know who to trust just from social media.
My personal rule of thumb is to check the IRS tool first to confirm they are legit. Then I look at Charity Navigator to see how much of my money actually goes to the programmes, not admin. That is usually the deciding factor for me.
It takes a few minutes, but it gives me real peace of mind.
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This reply was modified 5 days, 3 hours ago by Riley.
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This reply was modified 5 days, 3 hours ago by
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I find myself lucky to stumble on this thread and even more, the comment of Sara. I have also been looking for how to verify nonprofits. I have used all the suggestions made here, and they are all gold.
Meanwhile, I stumbled on two API tools that offer an automated way of verifying nonprofits. The one of interest to me is the Nonprofit Check Plus API because of its affordability, and I would need a second opinion.
This Nonprofit Check Plus API simplifies nonprofit verification by enabling one to check nonprofit status and relevant compliance information programmatically.
@Sara.A.Peterson With your expert knowledge, can you help give it a second look for me to see if it is something I should use?