by GuideStarOctober 2015

Hidden Business Opportunities in GuideStar Data

about u.S. non-

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Billions of Possibilities

At this moment, GuideStar has more than 2.5 billion pieces of data on nonprofits. This means that there are billions of possibilities for you to use information on the nonprofit sector to drive business to your company.

If you are familiar with GuideStar, you may consider us a resource for verifying a nonprofit’s tax-exempt status or analyzing nonprofit financial trends year over year. Sure, we provide those services, BUT GuideStar also works with clients on some creative projects using our growing data base.

Some of the requests are straightforward, like when a software provider asked “Can you create a list of nonprofits in California that spent more than $25,000 on technology in 2013?” Others, however, are unusual and require a creative approach.

Thinking Outside the Box: Priceless

A “not to be named” credit card processor wanted to identify nonprofits that paid $100,000 or more a year in credit card processing fees. Nothing in our database directly identified these expenditures. We do, however, have information from text fields on IRS Form 990 (the annual return that larger nonprofits must file with the IRS) where organizations report major expenses that don’t fit anywhere else on the form. By searching these fields for terms such as “bank charges,” “merchant charges,” and “cc charges,” we were able to generate a list for

WHERE DO WE GET OUR DATA?

GuideStar data come from three major sources:

• The IRS—we aggregate information from several IRS sources, including the Business Master File, Publication 78, Internal Revenue Bulletin, Automatic Revocation of Exemption list, and Forms 990, 990-EZ, and 990-PF.

• Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Treasury—when OFAC adds a nonprofit to the list of entities associated with terrorism, we add that information to the organization’s Nonprofit Profile in our database.

• The nonprofits themselves—every organization in our database is invited to update its Nonprofit Profile—for free. More than 100,000 nonprofits have updated.

Hidden Business Opportunities in GuideStar DataPrepared by GuideStar

October 2015

© 2015, GuideStar. All rights reserved. | 3www.guidestar.org

this client.

He was so pleased that periodically he would send us messages saying, “I have meetings in Austin next week with five organizations from your leads list,” and “Going to be in Vancouver to meet with organizations from your leads list!” (Many non-US organizations register with the IRS to get greater visibility with US donors. Those nonprofits are included in our database.)

Nonprofit Prospects

Many companies offer substantial discounts to the nonprofit sector. One technology provider wanted to arm its sales team with a list of nonprofits that qualified for its discounted products and services. We identified a list of 10,000 eligible nonprofits that could be integrated into a customer management system. Each organization met the necessary criteria: verified US charity that was not a school, hospital, or credit union, had more than 10 employees, and had less than $10 million in operating expenses. We were able to deliver all of the required fields to provide to the sales team, including name, address, phone number, website, and the names of preferred contact as well as executives and directors. GuideStar was able to save this company time and deliver nonprofit information that enabled the sales team to make great strides in gaining new nonprofit users.

Benchmarking Compensation

The president of a nonprofit retirement fund was hiring a new chief investment officer (CIO). He wanted to ensure that the salary he was thinking of paying this person was in line with what CIOs at similar organizations were earning. We identified 265 job titles in our database with “invest” in them. Our client selected 38, and our search on these titles produced compensation information for 140 investment officials at 150 nonprofits (some people received compensation from more than 1 organization). We also included the organization names and revenue data to enable our client to benchmark more accurately. Our customer received the information he needed to inform his compensation decisions and hire a new CIO with certainty.

He was so pleased that periodically he would send us messages saying, “I have meetings in Austin next week with five organizations from your leads list,” and “Going to be in Vancouver to meet with organizations from your leads list!”

© 2015, GuideStar. All rights reserved. | 4www.guidestar.org

DIY GuideStar Data Mining

The examples above all required custom data sets—special searches that GuideStar staff tailored to the clients’ needs. If you’re looking for multiple years of data for several organizations, several pieces of information on thousands of nonprofits, or unusual data as in the examples above, a custom data set may be the solution for you.

Many people, though, find what they need on their own through our website. We offer a free basic search, individual nonprofit reports for purchase, and two subscription searches. This graph shows some of the differences between these four options:

If you’re not sure which service will best meet your needs, call us at 866-710-7663, or contact us online.