September 28, 2006 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Donors in Kansas City, Mo., can go to a new Web site to learn more about local charities — and to make online donations.
DonorEdge provides profiles of more than 600 nonprofit organizations, detailing the groups’ missions, programs, management, and financial data. The Greater Kansas City Community Foundation created the site to meet donors’ growing demand for information about local nonprofit groups.
“We’ve been asked over the years by donors for more and more information about nonprofits — not judgmental information, but just truly some background so they can get a better idea of the types of things that they can fund,” says Laura McKnight, the foundation’s chief executive officer.
One donor, for example, recently used DonorEdge to learn more about four organizations to which he contributed. When he learned that one of the groups didn’t have a management-succession plan, says Ms. McKnight, he decided to make an additional gift to finance the development of such a plan.
In addition to providing information about charities, the Web site allows visitors to make online donations to the organizations. Since DonorEdge’s formal start last spring, donors have contributed more than $5,600 to local groups through the site.
The information compiled for DonorEdge has also been a boon for employees at the community foundation, says Ms. McKnight. In the past if a donor came to the foundation to find out about charities working on a specific issue, such as foster care, staff members had to rely on their own contacts and knowledge.
“We’d kind of scratch our heads, and say, ‘Oh yeah, we know some organizations that do foster care. Let me see. Yeah, a couple weeks ago I ran into somebody,’” she says. “Kind of off-the-top-of-your-head type stuff. So we now have at our fingertips really good, solid, objective information.”
Community foundations in Columbus, Ohio; Denver; Harrisburg, Pa.; Houston; Nashville; and San Antonio are using the technology the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation built to offer similar sites with information about local charities.
To get there: Go to https://www.donoredge.org.
