This article will help you understand how your store can support nonprofits as well as what organizations are eligible to be in our database.
Who’s Eligible?
Our database contains almost 2 million registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits for your brand and your customers to support. We pull our database directly from the IRS, so any 501(c)(3) organization that is registered within the US and is in good standing with the IRS should be in our system. We also regularly update our database to include new nonprofits, as well as to remove nonprofits that may have fallen out of compliance or lost their 501(c)(3) status.
Featured Causes
A merchant can select up to 6 featured nonprofits or one cause portfolio to support at any one time. Your selection of featured nonprofits will be displayed to your customer once they click on the donation widget on your site and open the charity selector to choose a cause to support with their purchase.
Customers can choose to support one of your listed featured causes or they can search our database for a different nonprofit they'd like to support. If you would only like to enable your customers to support one of your featured causes and would not like to allow them to search and select a cause of their choice, you can turn off the Cause Search within the Change Commerce app by following these instructions.
If you have a specific nonprofit in mind that you want to feature, such as the Make-A-Wish Foundation or American Heart Association, you can look them up in our system by name or by EIN (we recommend searching with the EIN when possible to ensure the correct nonprofit is selected)
To find a nonprofit’s EIN number you can visit Charity Navigator, Guidestar, or the nonprofit's website (check near the footer). You can also reach out to the ShoppingGives team and we’ll be happy to assist!
Additional Nonprofit Tools
- Default cause — Setting a default cause will allow a donation to be generated on every order, regardless if a shopper interacts with the donation widget or not
- With a default cause, the shopper still has the option to select a new cause if they wish to do so
- A cause must be first set as a featured cause to then be set as a default cause
- To set a default cause, follow the guide linked here!
- Cause multiplier — With a cause multiplier, you can choose a specific cause from your list of featured causes to donate an extra percentage
- For example, if you are donating 1% site-wide, you can choose to donate 2X (2%) if a shopper selects a specific cause
- The extra donation amount would only be applied if a shopper chooses the cause that you have set the multiplier on.
- Nonprofit Exclusions — Use this to remove specific nonprofits from the search functionality of your store. Learn more here.
- Nonprofit Category Exclusion — Use this to remove a category of nonprofits you would like to remove from your store's search functionality. Learn more here.