June 1, 2000 | Read Time: 2 minutes
By CONSTANCE CASEY
In Bloomberg Personal Finance (June), readers can find an article about two Web sites, GuideStar and GrantMatch.com, where they can research charities seeking donations. The two sites provide databases of non-profit organizations.
GuideStar (http://www.guidestar.org), which was started in 1996 by the non-profit organization Philanthropic Research, provides information from Internal Revenue Service sources on 620,000 non-profit groups. The site now gets an average of 1.6 million hits a week. GrantMatch (http://grantmatch.com), developed by Larry Elkus, a Michigan estate-planning lawyer, has information on over 16,000 groups.
Both sites are aimed at someone with an issue in mind but no idea precisely what group to support. At each site a potential donor can type in a topic — children or the environment, for example — and find the groups that specialize in dealing with those causes. Donors can find out about low-profile groups they might not have heard of before.
Mr. Elkus includes information about specific charity projects that need donations, in hope of appealing to what he sees as a creative donor — someone who wants to have some control over how the charitable dollars are spent. The donor he hopes to attract might be more interested in providing a camcorder to a school for children with behavioral problems than in writing a check to the American Red Cross or Harvard University, he said.
The grant seekers who have projects listed on GrantMatch say they like the site because they can update their project lists and grant requests regularly. They save money on fund raising because, rather than spending weeks composing a multiple-page application to one foundation, they can reach many potential grant makers with one GrantMatch listing.
Despite the temptation to compile a list of potential donors by tracking visitors to the site, Mr. Elkus decided to allow people to check the site anonymously.
The article is available at http://www.bloomberg.com/personal/vp_new99.html.
