What the public record says about your organization

The figures here come from IRS Form 990 filings, reached through ProPublica's free Nonprofit Explorer API. Filings usually become public a year or more after a fiscal year closes, so the record almost always runs behind the organization itself — a snapshot that looks quiet may simply be waiting on processing.

Organizations with receipts under $50,000 typically file the Form 990-N e-postcard, which shares almost no financial detail. If that's your organization, the public record says very little about you — which also means it does none of your talking for you.

The record works in the other direction, too: the same public filings can tell you who funds organizations like yours. We wrote the method down, free tools and all, in our guide to researching funders. And if you're a grantmaker holding a whole list of EINs, the Portfolio Pre-Flight reads them in one pass.

Most of all: these numbers describe money, not health. Two organizations with identical filings can be in very different shape — one with an engaged board, clear decision-making, and a plan; the other running on a single person's stamina. The numbers cannot tell those two apart. The people inside the organization can, when someone asks them the right questions confidentially — which is what KindTru's assessment does, across 18 categories.