GuideStar
For Expanding Guidestar’s Offerings Of Programmatic Information About Nonprofits
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Amount$150,000
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Program
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Date Awarded3/21/2012
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Term12.0 Months
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Type of SupportProject
Overview
As the anchor grantee of the Philanthropy Program’s Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative, GuideStar serves as a hub of information about nonprofits, collecting information from multiple sources and distributing it through multiple channels. To bolster GuideStar’s capacity to play this complex central role, it acquired two start-up organizations in March 2011: Philanthropedia and Social Actions. Philanthropedia (a former Hewlett Foundation grantee) aggregates the opinions of thousands of experts about which nonprofits are most effective, and Social Actions combines streams of nonprofit information from sixty different websites. Thus far, both acquisitions seem to have been successful in increasing both the quantity and quality of available information about nonprofit performance. This grant would cover some continued costs associated with these acquisitions as well as other activities to increase the quality and quantity of available information about nonprofits.
About the Grantee
Grantee Website
www.guidestar.org
Address
4801 Courthouse Street, Suite 220, Williamsburg, VA, 23188-2678, United States
Grants to this Grantee
for understanding the connection between nonprofit organizations and their intended beneficiaries
GuideStar is an information service specializing in reporting on US nonprofit organizations. GuideStar’s operations include data digitization, database management and development, nonprofit services, web site operations, research and verification of 501c3 public charity status. Those interested in reviewing a nonprofit’s recent Forms 990 can register at GuideStar.org and download them for free; additional information is available in various fee-based packages. With this grant, GuideStar will make improvements to its taxonomy of the target population(s) served by nonprofits and to its collection mechanisms for additional data from nonprofits about the composition of their populations served.
for support of exploratory project to assemble data on nonprofits’ participation in politics
GuideStar works to "gather and disseminate information about every single IRS-registered nonprofit organization." As such it is potentially in a unique position to assess the increasingly important role that nonprofit organizations are playing in American politics -- both in serving as advocates for particular points of view and, more and more, as institutional entities serving to route contributions from individual and institutional donors to political campaigns. The purpose of this exploratory project is to ascertain whether and how GuideStar, working with other Madison Initiative grantees, could use its core capabilities to illuminate the origin, destination, intent of politically-oriented funds flowing through nonprofits.
