Charity Data API

Businesses offering free plans to charities, or donating financially, need to quickly and reliably confirm that an organization is indeed a charity and eligible for tax-deductible donations.

The IRS does not offer an API, but it does publish a full list of nonprofit organizations in big csv files about once a month. Several companies charge thousands of dollars per year to access this publicly-available information via the convenience of an API. We believe that converting a CSV to an API should not cost thousands of dollars a year.

Introducing charityapi.org, a low-cost, simple way to confirm charitable status.

Simple Charity Check

The API is designed to do one thing: make the IRS nonprofit database available over API. Think of it as the API the IRS should have built. Simply ask for a Tax ID Number and use this API to confirm that the organization is tax-deductible according to the IRS.

To check if a charity is really a 501c3 via API, make a call to

https://www.charityapi.org/api/public_charity_check/:ein

where :ein is an Employer ID Number (AKA Tax ID Number). The API will return JSON like this:

{
   "data": {
       "public_charity": true,
       "ein": "474262060"
   }
}

This API call takes approximately 21ms on our system. Here’s a snapshot of our performance monitor.

Here’s a screenshot of us testing response times via Postman and hitting 56ms as measured by the client. Most of our responses are <80ms.

This solution is perfect for offering a free tier of your product to charities. Our hope is that more companies offer charities a free tier. There’s more to come; stay tuned.

Check it out at www.charityapi.org and please contact us with any questions. We’re happy to provide lower-price options for deserving projects.

Docs: https://docs.charityapi.org/

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