Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Winter 2005
Carnegie Results is a quarterly newsletter published by Carnegie Corporation of New York. It highlights Corporation supported organizations and projects that have produced reports, results or information of special note.
GuideStar: Data About
Nonprofits Goes Online
Editor’s Note: This edition of the Carnegie Results focuses on GuideStar, an organization that was created to provide a rich database of information about charities and philanthropies through an Internet-based delivery system. It’s been a successful effort, but one that faces a number of challenges in regard to costs, fees, sustainability and how best to serve the public, all issues we explore in these pages.
In any marketplace, knowledge is power. If participants have enough information, their self-interested decisions will foster productivity and reward innovation while starving inefficiency. It’s the magic of Adam Smith; with enough information, optimal resource allocation ought to take care of itself.
Nonprofits are no more exempt from the laws of the marketplace than they are from the law of gravity. The problem for funders is getting enough information. There are none of the profits that so effectively signal investors, after all, nor any customers to vote with their feet. Although a flight by funders can be equally telling, the decision to continue or pull the plug is much more complicated without the kind of clear messages a marketplace usually delivers. Under the circumstances, just how are donors to know what’s going on?
Enter GuideStar, a web site founded in 1994 to improve the dissemination
of information about charities and philanthropies. GuideStar (www.guidestar.org)
is doing just that; it now makes available, at no charge, 1.5 million
IRS Forms 990, the annual disclosures that nonprofits have to file with
the government. Some 85,000 charitable organizations have augmented this
by adding information of their own, and for a fee users can get more extensive
information, not just about any one organization but about a range of
them (such as, what do female CEOs of midsize nonprofits get paid in the
Northeast?). With more than 400,000 registered users, GuideStar has established
itself as the place to go for instant information about America’s
enormous nonprofit sector.