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Cause IQ is used each day by business development, marketing, sales, and strategy professionals that share the common goal of wanting to grow and improve their businesses' nonprofit offerings. Cause IQ equips our customers with the data and tools they need to make strategic business decisions to help accomplish this goal.

Cause IQ is designed to help you search for and identify nonprofit organizations in your target markets, generate bulk lead lists, research specific organizations in depth, find key personnel and contact information, and conduct market research on the organizations that matter to you most.

Directly below is a narrated detailed video that introduces some relevant features and best practices that are designed for you to help grow your company's nonprofit business vertical:

With over 460 fields available for filtering, Cause IQ helps you quickly find the organizations that are in your target market. You can use the search filter sidebar to drill down on organizations based on relevant quantitative (e.g., Total revenues,Total expenses, Accounting fees) and qualitative (e.g., Location, Types, All vendors and service providers) information. For example, you can use Cause IQ to create a target search that identifies 501(c)(3) organizations in the New York City metro area with more than $10 million in total revenues where at least 15% of that revenue comes from memberships. Let's learn how!

Create a new search

To begin narrowing down on nonprofits in your target market, you first need to open Cause IQ's search interface. You can access the search interface to create a new search from:

• The "New organization search" button on your dashboard
• The spyglass icon on your navigation bar
• The "Start organization search with filters" below the smart search box

Here's a look at where you can create a new search from your dashboard:

Add search filters

Cause IQ's search filter sidebar (on the left of the search interface) lets you filter by over 460 fields so you can narrow down on the organizations that matter to you. By default, Cause IQ displays some of the most commonly used filters by all of our customers and a few industry-specific recommended filters on the search filter sidebar. You can view all 460+ filters by clicking the blue "Advanced search" button where they're organized by topical categories.

Once you find the filter(s) you want to add:

1. Click on the name of the filter
2. For qualitative filters, select one or more of the options available OR
3. For quantitative filters, enter the minimum and/or maximum value range
4. For text filters, type the appropriate names/keywords
5. Click "Add filter"

Here's an overview video showing you how to add qualitative, quantitative, and text filters to your Cause IQ search query:

Save and monitor your searches

Once you find the organizations that are a good fit for your products or services, you can save your search query so you can easily access them for future use. When saving a search, you also have the option to monitor the search for changes (i.e., receive alerts when newly matched organizations enter the search and organizations that no longer match the search criteria). Cause IQ takes a look at your saved and monitored searches on a weekly basis and we provide updates to you via email and within the dashboard.

Here's an overview video highlighting how to save your target searches, how to monitor them, and where to access them from your dashboard:

Most Cause IQ customers want to get the data that's relevant to them out of the Cause IQ website. This way, they can share their findings with colleagues and load the information into their CRM / marketing automation software. Cause IQ has a few specific features that are designed to help you easily download pertinent information in bulk.

Download organization and contact information with the export tool

You can use our export tool to generate CSV files containing relevant organization details and contact information when desired. After generating an export report, you can load the data into your CRM, marketing automation software, etc. Here are the general steps you want to take when generating a bulk report with Cause IQ's export tool:

Here's an overview video highlighting how you can use Cause IQ's export tool to generate bulk reports of organization data and contacts:

Download organization details from Cause IQ's table tool

Cause IQ's table tool lets you download an Excel file of quantitative and qualitative organization information. You can use these Excel files to share your findings with colleagues and further analyze the relevant information. After you've either created a new search, loaded a saved search, or opened a list (from scratch or an uploaded CSV) in the search interface, click on the "Table" tab to access the table tool.

You can add most organization information to the table tool as a column. To download the organization information to Excel, click "Download table" and access the file from your computer's downloads folder.

Here's a look at where you can download organization information from Cause IQ's table tool:

Many business opportunities come from inbound requests, such as referrals, SEO webpage landings, random RFPs, and social media campaigns, to name a few. However, not all of these inbound opportunities are equal, and many are not even a good fit for your business to begin with. Figuring out which inbound opportunities you should pursue and which ones you should stay away from can save many hours of your time and allows you to focus your efforts in the right direction.

Cause IQ provides you with the data and tools you need to decide if an individual organization is the right fit to grow your business, including understanding if an organization meets your target market criteria, seeing which vendors the organization already works with, knowing what the nonprofit does and cares about, and learning if they can afford to work with you.

Access organization profiles in Cause IQ

Cause IQ's organization profiles are the place to start when researching your opportunities to see if they're a good fit for your company. You can access a nonprofit's Cause IQ profile page from anywhere where the organization's name is linked. This includes:

• The smart search box
• The list tool in the search interface
• The table tool in the search interface
• Other organization profile pages
• Your dashboard
• Personnel profile pages

To find a specific organization profile, we suggest using the smart search box at the top of the search interface. This feature allows you to search for organizations by name or EIN, and when the match is identified, you can click on the name of the organization to access their profile page.

View the data we have on a specific organization.

Cause IQ's profile pages are where you'll find all the data that we have on a specific organization. The information and data on these profiles help you understand if an organization meets your target market criteria and if they can afford to work with you. Here's an overview of the different sections that you'll see within an organizations profile (when available):

• Top of the profile: Access your customized quick fields, view a financial summary, see an organization's detailed description, view the Types, Issues, and Characteristics for the organization, and see the saved searches and lists that the organization belongs to
• Summary tab: View customizable KPIs, location information, website, general IRS tax details, and categorization classifications
• Program areas tab: Understand an organization's most important mission-driven activities/accomplishments and any revenue or expenses related to the activities
• Funding tab: Learn where the organization gets its funding, including fundraising events, grants from other nonprofits, and federal contributions
• Grantmaking tab: For grantmaking organizations, view summary grant activity, characteristics of their grant recipients, and individual grants made
• Financials tab: Download an organization's Form 990s (or 990-PFs, 990-EZs, 990-Ns) and view the past two years of digitized financials
• Personnel tab: View identified staff and board members, see contact information (e.g., email address, direct phone number) when available, and view individual compensation when available
• Vendors tab: See all current and past companies that Cause IQ has identified an organization using, and, when available, the amount paid for the service
• Related entities tab: View details on any other nonprofit, corporation, or partnership that has a legal relationship with the given organization, including companies or organizations controlled by the organization, parent or child organizations, and brother or sister organizations
• Employee benefit plan tab: View the employee benefit plans organizations offer, the vendors they use to run the plans, and the number of employees that participate in the plans
• Similar nonprofits tab: See Cause IQ classified similar nonprofits to the organization that you're researching and open them in the search interface

Here's a video that walks through the different sections of an organization's profile page:

Customize your organization quick fields and key performance indicators

Cause IQ's quick fields -- in the grey box at the top of organization profile pages -- and key performance indicators (KPIs) -- in the organization profile Summary section -- are customizable. We designed these features to help you easily view the most relevant qualifying characteristics when researching individual organizations.

You can add almost all available Cause IQ fields to the quick fields up top and you can add all quantitative fields to your KPIs. For the quick fields, Cause IQ shows the most recent data value. For the KPIs, Cause IQ displays the most recent value, shows the percent change over the past year, and provides a line graph that shows how the fields' value has changed over the past five years.

For example, if you're an accounting firm, you can add the Tax preparer firm field to your quick fields and the Accounting fees field to your KPIs to quickly learn which firm the organization uses to prepare their 990, how much they spend on tax and audit services, and how the fee-for-service field has changed for the organization over the years. If you care more about an organization's investable assets, go ahead and add the All cash, savings, and investments field to the quick fields and/or KPIs.

To choose your quick fields and KPIs, click the "Settings" button at the top-right of an organization profile and select the desired fields. Once you choose your quick fields and KPIs on one profile, they become the defaults on all profiles that you visit.

Here's an overview video highlighting the quick fields and KPIs and how to change them:

Download individual organization reports

To help you evaluate organizations and determine if they're the right fit for your company, Cause IQ offers two downloadable organization reports from a profile page. Cause IQ packages all available information (including the past five years of digitized financials) for a given organization in a detailed Excel report and offers a snapshot of the nonprofit with a PDF one-pager. You can download these reports for further analysis and email them throughout your office to share the insights you discover. To download an organization's detailed Excel report or PDF one-pager, click the "Download" button at the top of the profile and choose "Download one-page (PDF)" or "Download report (XLSX)" as appropriate.

Here's an overview video showing you where to download individual organization reports and what they offer:

When you're looking to grow your nonprofit client base, it's crucial that you have access to accurate and up-to-date personnel information so you can introduce your product(s) or service(s). That's why Cause IQ has a half dozen data sources dedicated to identifying the staff and board members at organizations. Our tools help you identify relevant key personnel, export relevant contacts in a bulk report, and view identified staff and board members at a given organization.

Personnel title levels and functions

To help you find the right personnel quickly, Cause IQ classifies personnel by their job levels (e.g., Chief, Board, Manager) and functions (e.g., Marketing, Executive, Accounting). You'll see levels and functions used multiple places, including choosing which people to include in a bulk report, finding specific individuals with the people search, and seeing which people work at specific organizations from the personnel section of the organization's profile page.

Job levels represent how high up in a given organization's hierarchy a position is. Since there's great variation in the nonprofit sector with the title structures organizations use -- charities typically use directors whereas associations use vice presidents and chiefs -- we recommend selecting multiple levels when searching and exporting personnel. This will help you isolate the right personnel across all types of organizations.

Job functions represent the general responsibilities and activities for a position. To help you find the right personnel we have grouped similar job functions, such as Marketing / Communications. The selected job functions are combined with the levels, so any combination of level and function will result in a match. For example, if you select Chief, Director, and Vice president as your levels and Executive, Marketing / Communications, and Finance as your functions, you can expect to return personnel with the following job titles: 

• Chief Executive Officer
• Chief Marketing Officer
• Director of Finance
• Vice President of Communications

Here's a screenshot of the title level and function selector when choosing the types of contacts you want included in a bulk export report:

Export contact information in a bulk report

You can use the purpose-built export tool to generate CSV files of relevant organization and personnel records. Once the information is out of Cause IQ, you can share the information with your colleagues and/or load the details back into your CRM. Here are the general steps, and there are more detailed steps in the "Export lists in bulk" section above:

1. Choose the organizations that you want to export by creating a target search with filters or opening a list of specific entities in the search interface
2. Click the "Export" tab to access the export tool
3. Select the "Personnel, with organization details" export option
4. Choose the types of contacts you want in your report by title levels / functions and available contact information
5. Choose the organization and contact information that you want to be included as columns in your report
6. Generate and download your export report

Here's a look at a Cause IQ export report containing contact information:

View identified staff and board working at an individual organization

When researching specific organizations, many Cause IQ customers want to know the identified personnel working at the given organization. That's why Cause IQ includes the personnel section on organization profile pages. The information available in the personnel section includes an individual's:

• Name
• Job position(s)
• Email address (if available)
• Direct phone number (if available)
• Form 990 compensation (if available)
• LinkedIn profile (if available)

All personnel in Cause IQ are stamped with a Date of data. This date represents the last time one of our data sources confirmed the individual working at the organization. Here's a look at the personnel section on an organization's profile:

View dedicated profiles for key personnel

All personnel in Cause IQ have a unique profile that you can access to view all their information in one place. Cause IQ's personnel profiles contain descriptive, contact, and compensation information. The specific fields available for a given person vary based on the data sources we have for that person. You can access an individual's personnel profile by clicking on their name from the personnel section of the corresponding organization's profile. If you're looking for information on a specific person, you can use Cause IQ's people search to access the individual's profile. Here's a look at an individual's profile page in Cause IQ:

Successful business development rests, in large part, on you understanding your market and target personas. If you have no idea who you're trying to sell to and the state of the market, you will repeatedly find yourself at dead ends and lost opportunities. Cause IQ's data and tools give you what you need to better understand organizations that matter to you most.

View organization details in a tabular format from the search interface

Cause IQ's table tool in the search interface lets you view and compare relevant information for multiple organizations at once. You can use the table tool to examine fee-for-service expenses (e.g., Information tech expenses, Pro. fundraising fees) for multiple inbound opportunities or organizations in a specific region, and also compare which vendors the organizations are using. You can sort the organizations in the table by quantitative column header, and to help share your findings with colleagues you can download the table to Excel by selecting "Download table".

Here are the general steps:

1. Create a search of target organizations using a combination of quantitative and qualitative filters (or add a My saved lists filter to narrow down to a specific nonprofit list)
2. Click on the "Table" tab in the search interface to access the table tool
3. Choose the data points that you want to display as columns by selecting "Change columns" at the top-right of the page

Here's an overview video highlighting Cause IQ's table tool:

View summary stats and trends for relevant organizations from the search interface

You can use the analyze tool in the search interface to discover sector-wide trends for your clients and for organizations meeting your target criteria. This tool is super helpful to better understand which companies relevant organizations work with, where nonprofits are located, and where a group of organizations derives revenue from.

You can add most quantitative and qualitative fields to the analysis report. Cause IQ summarizes the quantitative information (e.g., Accounting fees) in a bar graph. The graph shows the average, median, sum total and breaks down where the organizations fall in respect to the quantitative field by percentile. The qualitative information (e.g., Tax preparer firm) is summarized in a list. The list shows you the top 10 results with respect to the selected field, and you can view all the results by selecting "Show all values".

For example, if you're a CPA firm located in Washington DC, you can put together a search segementing 501(c)(3)s in the DC metro area that spend between $20,000 and $50,000 on tax and audit services annually, and you can add the Tax preparer firm field to the analyze tool to see which CPA firms are used most by the relevant DC nonprofits.

Here's a look at Cause IQ's analyze tool:

If you would like to connect with a Cause IQ team member to schedule a one-on-one web training, feel free to reach out to us from the orange chat widget at the bottom-right of the screen.

Also, here are a few other articles that can help you get the most out of Cause IQ:

• Getting started with Cause IQ
• Cause IQ's filter and field glossary
• Cause IQ search interface overview
• Cause IQ dashboard overview