The public record of US giving, made searchable.

Search organizations by name, EIN, or the language of their mission and programs. Open an organization to see its identity, its 990 narrative, and the grants it has given or received as reported on Form 990 Schedule I (public charities) or Form 990-PF Part XV (private foundations).

The product is built for people who think in terms of who funds whom — philanthropic advisors, foundation program officers, catalytic capital investors, journalists, and nonprofit operators trying to understand their ecosystem.

All data on this site originates from IRS Form 990 e-filings — the legally required annual returns that tax-exempt organizations submit to the federal government. The IRS publishes these returns as bulk XML.

We access this data through GivingTuesday’s Data Commons, which parses the IRS XML into clean, analysis-ready datamarts and makes them freely available. Their work is the reason this product is possible at the scale and quality it is — without their parsing layer, every team building on 990 data would be reinventing the same wheel.

The specific tables behind this site include 990 basic fields, 990-PF basic fields, 990 mission and program narratives, Schedule O Part III narratives, Schedule I grants given by public charities, and Form 990-PF grants given by private foundations.

We take GivingTuesday’s parsed datamarts and load them into a Postgres database built for fast search and lineage. For each organization we resolve a single canonical identity from its most recent filing, attach its narrative text, and link it to the grants it has given and received.

Search runs in two modes. Name matching is a substring match against the canonical org name and any DBAs. Narrative matching is a full-text search over the mission, program activities, and Schedule O Part III text using Postgres full-text indexes with English stemming. The default mode combines both signals and ranks name matches above narrative-only matches.

Every filing we display is tagged with a source version and run ID so you can trace a record back to the underlying ingestion. Look for the lineage line at the bottom of any organization page.

The honest disclosures matter as much as what we have:

• Paper filers are excluded. Mandatory e-filing applies to tax years beginning after July 2019. Smaller organizations with prior-year paper returns are missing or partial.
• Lag is real. A 990 filed in calendar year 2024 may cover a 2022 or 2023 fiscal year. Treat the data as a historical record, not a real-time feed.
• Smallest nonprofits file 990-N. Organizations under $50K in gross receipts file the “e-postcard” which contains almost no detail. They appear in IRS lists but not in this product’s narratives or grant records.
• Grant recipient EINs are messy. Foundations report grantees as free text. Matching that text back to a recipient EIN is a hard data problem and not something we currently do at scale on this site.
• Self-reported. Form 990 narratives are written by the filer. They reflect how the organization describes itself, not an independent audit.

peerlo is built and maintained by Vibrant Data Labs. VDL builds data infrastructure, analysis tools, and interactive products for climate finance, philanthropy, and the broader nonprofit sector. We work with foundations, catalytic capital investors, and mission-driven organizations trying to understand and move capital more effectively.

Other things we’ve built using related data include the US Climate Finance Tracker.

Found a bug, a missing organization, or want to use this data in your own work? Reach out at hello@vibrantdatalabs.org.