This will help you understand how your store can support nonprofits, and who is in our database.
Who’s Eligible?
Our database contains over 1.5 million registered 501(c)(3) nonprofits for your brand and your customers to support. We pull our database directly from the IRS and regularly update our database to include new nonprofits, as well as removing nonprofits that may fall out of compliance or lose 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 list of featured nonprofits will be shown to your customer once they click on the donation widget on your site and open the charity selector to pick 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.
A cause portfolio is a curated group of nonprofits with similar missions. For example, the Environmental Sustainability portfolio is comprised of 4 individual nonprofit organizations that all advocate for a greener earth.
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 by the nonprofits EIN to ensure you’re selecting the correct cause.
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’d be happy to help!
Additional Nonprofit Tools
- Default cause:
- By setting a default cause, a donation will be generated on every order, regardless if a shopper activates 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, visit the Cause Manager section within the Change Commerce app, select the nonprofit you’d like to default, then select ‘Set as Default.’
- Cause multiplier: With a cause multiplier, you can choose a specific cause from your list of featured causes to donate an extra percentage to.
- 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. Read more here.
- Nonprofit Category Exclusion: Use this to remove a category of nonprofits you would like to remove from your store's search functionality. Read more here.