About CheckMyDonation and our method

CheckMyDonation helps donors confirm that a charity is real, registered and in good standing before they give. It combines official charity registers into one search, starting with England and Wales and the United States, with Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to follow.

Every record comes from a public register: the Charity Commission for England and Wales register extract (Open Government Licence v3.0) and the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File with the Statistics of Income Form 990 and 990-EZ extracts (US government works). Each page links to its source record and shows the date of the extract it was built from.

On top of the raw records we compute income percentiles within each country and cause, the closest peers by size, multi-year income and spending trends, and plain-language notes where the register records something a donor should know, such as overdue accounts, insolvency or several years of spending above income. Notes describe what the register says; they are not judgements about a charity's work.

Pages for charities with too little data to analyse are kept out of search engines but stay available to anyone who searches by name or number. Our derived data is published under CC BY 4.0. To report an error, email [email protected] with the charity number; we fix register-derived errors at the next refresh and tell the source register when the error is theirs.

The site runs on a prototype embedded database on a single small server: records and search prefixes live in its key-value store and the browse pages use its SQL engine. The engine status page shows live query timings.