Our Story: Tech For Charities

The mission: Make building tech for charities easy.
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The method: CharityAPI.org provides reliable & accurate IRS data on US nonprofits and charities over API.

In 2016, the MEANS Database, a food recovery platform that helps charities connect with leftover food nearby, had a problem. They were getting hundreds of signups from charities searching for food and couldn't confirm that the charities were truly charitable organizations quickly enough. Worse, individuals were signing up and claiming food intended to go to charities. MEANS then required that charities provide a tax ID number, but fraudsters switched to using fraudulent tax IDs. Finally, the MEANS team built an internal system for checking that tax ID numbers were valid and associated with the correct organization. Realizing that other charities likely had the same problem, MEANS spun out CharityAPI.org so that others can easily build in charity support for their apps.

Since 2016, CharityAPI.org has powered companies wishing to quickly confirm that a given company truly is a charitable nonprofit. Companies use CharityAPI.org to do quick charity checks of a given Tax ID (EIN).