Search for Specific Charities Using the GuideStar® Database

  • Search from among the more than 850,000 nonprofit organizations in the GuideStar® database-every 501(c) nonprofit organization to which contributions may be tax deductible.
  • Use the wildcard character (*) to find organizations whose reports include all forms of a search term. For example, using school* as the keyword will find reports that include the words school, schools, schooling, schoolchild, and schoolchildren.
  • Use boolean terms to expand or refine a search. Use or to expand a search; use and with terms enclosed in parentheses to narrow it. To find reports that contain either the word cats or the word dogs, for example, use cats or dogs as the search term. To find homeless shelters that have food banks, use (food bank* or food pant*) and homeless as the search term.
  • Use a phrase enclosed in quotation marks to find organizations whose names include commonly used words. The search engine stops reading the query terms when it encounters commons words such as a, for, in, the, to, and united. To find an organization whose name includes common words, put the organization's name in quotation marks: "christmas in april," "habitat for humanity," "united way."
  • Use or in the City field of Advanced Search to find organizations in more than one specific city. For example, Boston or Salem or Plymouth.
  • Use Advanced Search to narrow a search. Use Advanced Search to limit a search to a single city, a single state, a single zip code or zip code radius, a category of work or service, or organizations in a specific income range.
  • Use several Advanced Search fields at one time to refine a search even further. Note: the EIN field overrides all of the other Advanced Search fields, and the Zip Code field overrides the city and state fields.
  • The GuideStar search engine scans the name, description, and NTEE codes of each organization's GuideStar Report for the search term(s).
  • The search is not case sensitive. For example, searching on GuideStar, guidestar, Guidestar, guIdesTar, or any other combination of the word will return the same search results.
  • By default, the search results page lists organizations whose GuideStar Reports contain all of the terms in your query. For example, typing cats dogs in the Quick Search box or the Keyword field of Advanced Search will return only those organizations whose reports contain both words.
  • Each search results page lists a maximum of 1,000 organizations.
  • GuideStar Participants—organizations that have added information to the GuideStar database—appear first in the search results. Nonprofits for which GuideStar has Form 990 information appear next, and all other organizations are listed at the end of the search results. The nonprofits are listed in alphabetical order within each of these three categories.