GuideStar

GuideStar has been the anchor grantee of the Philanthropy Program's Nonprofit Marketplace Initiative for the last several years, playing two key roles. First, it gathers information about nonprofit performance from multiple sources, including four other Philanthropy Program grantees. Second, GuideStar distributes that data to users through channels such as Fidelity, Bank of America, Facebook, and VolunteerMatch. In late 2012 GuideStar came under the new leadership of Jacob Harold, former Program Officer in the Hewlett Foundation's Philanthropy Program. With this new leadership, GuideStar is looking to move beyond the provision of nonprofit financial data to include multi-dimensional data about nonprofit performance and social change. This grant would support GuideStar as it explores and refines this evolving vision.

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 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. This grant would help support Guidestar’s continued growth as a platform for programmatic information, including costs associated with these acquisitions.