The road from IRS offices to Candid search
Candid insights | Since the late 1950s, we’ve worked to open up public access to philanthropic funding information. Today we’re continuing to enhance Candid search so you can find accurate, tailored fiundraising information quickly and easily.
In the late 1950s, a woman named Marianna Olmstead Lewis took dozens of trips to IRS offices with one goal: to open up public access to information on philanthropic funding. She and her colleagues at the Foundation Center believed that freely available information was how you build trust in the social sector. Her work led to the first Foundation Directory, and in many ways, she wrote the book on what foundation funding looks like and who it reaches.
Marianna’s insistence on accuracy and access is why the Foundation Center, and later Candid, became the trusted source people turn to for information on grants, foundations, and nonprofits.
From a book to a platform
We became Candid in 2019 because the sector told us it needed one clear, complete picture of philanthropy. Candid’s predecessors, Foundation Center and GuideStar, ran on entirely different systems, built years apart with different assumptions about how data should be structured. Merging them meant reconciling more than 20 million grants and over 50 million original source records from different feeds, which we match, clean, and normalize into the single best picture of each of roughly three million organizations. All without sacrificing accuracy. That reconciliation was only step one. More than 40 Candid staff across data science, engineering, and development teams worked to turn that combined data into something usable: what we now call Candid search. It’s the kind of detail-heavy, unglamorous but absolutely essential work that no user ever sees directly. The work hasn’t stopped since we launched Candid search, with many improvements based on user feedback.
You told us you wanted more customized search results. We’re making sure you see what’s most relevant.
Candid serves nonprofits and funders but also tech companies, sector service providers, and entrepreneurs building their own solutions on top of our data. Each of those users comes to the same “search bar” looking for something different, and you told us there’s room to more closely tailor the results to what you’re trying to find. We’re rolling out regular updates to how search ranks and returns results, along with more ways to customize what you see. This is ongoing work by design. As our users’ needs evolve, we will keep sharpening search to meet them.
For fundraisers who want to skip straight to top funder prospects instead of searching, we’ve also launched a new AI fundraising assistant. A few simple prompts return a list of funders with a track record of supporting similar organizations, complete with giving history and help drafting letters of intent (LOIs), cutting down to minutes what used to take weeks.
You told us your own systems needed to keep working. We opened the data up.
Plenty of long-time users have built research workflows around exporting Candid data into their own systems. We recently launched grants downloads directly from organizational profiles to support that, and we’re now extending the same capability to landscapes, our data visualization tool for exploring giving by cause area, geographic area, populations served, and other criteria. That expansion is on track for this fall.
You told us compliance kept you up at night. We’re building alerts.
No funder wants to be surprised by a grantee falling out of regulatory compliance. Compliance alerts will soon notify funders when a grantee’s status changes, so you find out in real time instead of during your next review cycle. It’s one piece of a broader effort to reassure funders on compliance, and state-specific tracking is a good example of the rest of that work: California organizations are already covered, with Hawaii next, and we’ll keep adding states as their nonprofit compliance requirements evolve.
You told us account management was clunky. We upgraded it.
Changing a subscription level, managing seats, assigning roles across a team—these should be easy, so you can concentrate on your research. You told us our account management made simple tasks harder than they needed to be, so we rebuilt that experience on a new Stripe integration (coming soon). It’s a small thing compared with offering a full-scale fundraising assistant, but we understand it’s the kind of friction that adds up over a year. So, upgrading it was worth doing right.
The same instinct, decades later
None of this happens without people telling us what they need. That’s been true since a woman with a stack of IRS files decided the sector deserved better access to information, and it’s still true today.
We’ve got exciting things on the horizon, like easy budgeting tools for nonprofits and dashboards customized to fit funders’ purposes. You can find updates on Candid insights, where we’ll regularly add release notes on enhancements and new features. If you have feedback, no matter how big or small, we want to hear it.
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