Guidestar list 501c3 Organizations
A couple of weeks ago I got curious about some local charities, and went to GuideStar to check some of them out. By chance my daughter, who works for a large financial institution, called, and I mentioned to her what I was doing. She says they use Guidestar all the time to check non-profits. I thought, there’s a problem…because much of the information that I could see about some of the local non-profits were not up to date, or had almost no information, and donors are encouraged to use GuideStar to make “informed decisions.”
I was about to do a blog post about that when Nonprofit Tech 2.0 beat me to it with their post: What Your Nonprofit Needs to Know About GuideStar, Network for Good and Social Media Fundraising (read the post, it’s good, and the comments are also enlightening).
If you are a 501c 3, you are in the GuideStar database, and anyone can look you up, see a profile of your organization and your tax returns. The GuideStar database is used by Network for Good to provide organizations with online donations, and other social media fundraising tool partner with Network for Good. You can read more about Network for Good and some of their partners Give a Tweet, Change.org, Razoo and Facebook Causes on your own.
So what is GuideStar saying about your organization? Is the information outdated? Is your address correct? As Nonprofit Tech 2.0 advises:
“If you have not updated your entry in Guidestar recently, please visit Guidestar’s Nonprofit Resources. If you are not sure whether your nonprofit is in Guidestar, please visit GuideStar.org and in the “Search” box enter your EIN number with the dash [XX-XXXXXXX]. If nothing comes up, then your organization is not in Guidestar. See GuideStar’s FAQ for more infomation or e-mail them at nposervices@guidestar.org. Good luck. The good news is you only have to update GuideStar once a year!”
With online donations on the rise, do you want to be left out?
Want to learn more about the web and Social Media? Join us at our next non-profit mini-conference.
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