Help Center

You can find specific types of organizations by thinking about the phrases that organizations use to describe themselves. For example, if you are looking for grassroots activist organizations, they might use the phrases "grassroots organizing" or "grassroots movement" to describe their activities (among other phrases). You can then search for those phrases in organizations' descriptions in Cause IQ, which will help identify these organizations. Here is more information on organizations' decsriptions:

Descriptions: We have over 85,000 descriptions, usually 200-500 words, for nonprofits, largely manually created from our research team. You can search an organization's description with the Detailed descriptionfield, located in the "Categories and characteristics" section of the "All filters" module.

Here's a quick summary video:

*** See this help article on how to create phrase searches in these fields ***

You can search multiple different keywords or phrases at the same time. For example:

If the types of organizations you're looking for carry out specific types of activities, and those activities earn them money, then you're in luck. Organizations must report their financial disclosures on these money-earning activities -- called "program service" revenue -- via fill-in-the-blank fields on the Form 990. Cause IQ has digitized these fields and made them searchable. You can find the Program service, keywords filter within the "Revenue: General" section of the "All filters" module

You can construct the keyword searches using the standard keyword search syntax, just make sure to use individual words, though, because we aren't searching for phrases here.

To help find keywords to search, just open a few organization profiles and click the "Financials" tab to see what they have listed under their "Program service revenues" section.

If the organizations you're looking for receive grant or contract funding from the federal government, you can search for other organizations that have similar funding sources. Cause IQ has federal funding information for organizations that complete the A-133 Single Audit, which in general is organizations with more than $750k in federal funding. There are two relevant fields within this federal funding information:

• A-133 federal agencies: The federal department or agency that provides funding to the organization. Organizations can have multiple federal agency funders.
• A-133 CFDA programs: The specific federal program the organization received funding from. Organizations can have multiple CFDA programs. CFDA stands for Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance.

To check the federal funding sources for an organization, go to the organization's profile page and click the "Vendors" tab. Here, look for the "A-133 auditor" section (if it's not there, they don't complete the A-133 audit). Click on the "See detailed information on the A-133 audit" link to see the specific details, including federal agencies and CFDA programs.

You can also find which federal agencies or CFDA programs multiple organizations are using with the analyze tool. Get a search (or list) together with organizations for which you want to determine federal agency and CFDA program usage. Then add the A-133 federal agencies and/or the A-133 CFDA programs fields by clicking open the "Change fields" popup tool. You can then see which agencies and programs are most common among the organizations, and add them to your search query with a single click.

Once you know which agencies or CFDA programs you want to find, you'll want to add a new filter for that agency or program. Within the "Accounting and audit" section of the "All filters" module, select the A-133 federal agencies or A-133 CFDA programs filters. Then choose which agencies or programs you want.

For example, if you are targeting organizations teaching English as a second language, you'd probably want to select the "English Language Acquisition State Grants" CFDA program. Or if you were targeting organizations working abroad, you may want to select the "U.S. Agency for International Development" or "Department of State" federal agencies.