What's actually in a Form 990?

If your organization is a nonprofit, you probably file a Form 990 with the IRS every year — it's the annual return for tax-exempt organizations, and once the IRS processes it, it becomes public. You don't need gleantree to read one: ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer lets you look up any single organization's 990 for free, and it's genuinely good. You need gleantree for the other 1.9 million. There are roughly 1.9 million tax-exempt organizations in the country, most of them filing a 990 of some kind each year — and the few that matter to your work are buried somewhere in that pile. Finding them is the problem we work on.

So what's in one? A 990 is really a nonprofit's yearly portrait: what it brought in and what it spent, what it owns and owes, who runs it and what they're paid, and — for foundations — every grant it made and who received it. No marketing gloss, just what the organization reported to the government.

One thing worth being upfront about: a 990 is always a look in the rearview mirror. It covers the organization's prior fiscal year, and there's a further lag before the IRS publishes it — so by the time you read one, it's usually describing a year that ended 12 to 18 months ago, sometimes more. That sounds like a dealbreaker until you look at what the data is good for. The things a 990 reveals — which causes a funder backs, the size of the grants it writes, where it gives, how an organization's finances are trending — tend to change slowly. A foundation that funded youth programs across your state last year is very likely still doing it this year. For deciding who to approach and understanding how they operate, a complete picture that's a year old beats a real-time one that doesn't exist.

So that's what we do with all of it. Each week we read across every filing and send you the handful worth your attention — the Gleanings below this note. And when you want to go prospecting yourself, the Workbench lets you search the whole set for funders whose giving fits your work. Next week: what the financial pages actually tell you.