Help Center

Many business opportunities come from inbound requests, such as referrals, SEO webpage landing pages, random RFPs, and social media campaigns, to name a few. However, not all opportunities are equal, and many are not even a good fit for your business to begin with. Figuring out which business opportunities you should pursue and which ones you should stay away from can save many hours of your time and allows you to focus your efforts in the right direction.

Cause IQ provides you with the data and tools you need to decide if an individual organization is the right fit to grow your business, including understanding if an organization meets your target market criteria, seeing which vendors the organization already works with, knowing what the nonprofit does and cares about, and learning if they can afford to work with you.

Cause IQ collects and cleans data from over a dozen data sources and displays all available data for a specific organization in one place, their profile page. A Cause IQ organization profile page is the place to start when you want to learn as much as you can about a nonprofit. For example, you can access an organization's profile to view relevant quantitative key performance indications (e.g., Total revenues, Accounting fees) and descriptive details (e.g., Location, Types, Issues) to help you determine if the organization is the right fit for your company.

You can access an organization's profile wherever you see the name of the organization linked, including:

• The smart search box
• The list tool in the search interface
• The table tool in the search interface
• Other organization profile pages
• Your dashboard
• Personnel profile pages

To access a specific organization's profile page, we suggest using the smart search box at the top of the search interface or at the top of your dashboard. This feature allows you to search for organizations by name or EIN, and when the match is identified, you can click on the name of the organization to access their profile page.

As mentioned above, Cause IQ's profile pages are where you'll find all the data that we have on a specific organization. The data that we display within a profile can help you make informed decisions to grow your company. Here's an overview of the different sections that you'll see within an organization's profile (when available):

• Top of the profile: Access your customized quick fields, view a financial summary, see an organization's detailed description, view the Types, Issues, and Characteristics for the organization, and see the saved searches and lists that the organization belongs to
• Summary tab: View customizable KPIs, location information, website, general IRS tax details, and categorization classifications
• Program areas tab: Understand an organization's most important mission-driven activities/accomplishments and any revenue or expenses related to the activities
• Funding tab: Learn where the organization gets its funding, including fundraising events, grants from other nonprofits, and federal contributions
• Grantmaking tab: For grantmaking organizations, view number of grants made, average grant size details, characteristics of their grant recipients, and individual grants made
• Financials tab: Download an organization's Form 990s (or 990-PFs, 990-EZs) and view the past two years of digitized financials
• Personnel tab: View identified staff and board members, see contact information (e.g., email address, direct phone number) when available, and view individual compensation when available
• Vendors tab: See all current and past companies that Cause IQ has identified an organization using, and, when available, the amount paid for the service
• Related entities tab: View details on any other nonprofit, corporation, or partnership that has a legal relationship with the given organization, including companies or organizations controlled by the organization, parent or child organizations, and brother or sister organizations
• Employee benefit plan tab: View the employee benefit plans organizations offer, the vendors they use to run the plans, and the number of employees that participate in the plans
• Similar nonprofits tab: See Cause IQ classified similar nonprofits to the organization that you're researching and open them in the search interface

Here's a video that walks through the different sections of an organization's profile page:

The data displayed in the different sections of an organization's profile page provides you with what you need to determine if an organization is a good fit for your company. For example, the information you can access here will help you understand an organization's interactions with vendors and service providers, learn more about an organization's mission and how they're structured, and determine if an organization has the budget to afford your products or services. Here are a few best practices and tips to help you accomplish these objectives:

Understand an organization's interactions with vendors and service providers

Cause IQ uses a half dozen data sources to identify vendors that nonprofits work with and the services they provide organizations. The vendors section on an organization's profile page is where you can find all the current and past vendors we've identified an organization working with. For example, you can access the vendors section on an organization's profile page to view the accounting firm that prepared the organization's most recent and past Form 990s, the professional fundraisers the organization uses to help them raise money (if available),  the technologies the organization uses on their website, and more. Check out this article for more information on the vendors section within an organization's profile, and there's a screenshot of the vendors section within an organization's profile below:

Learn about an organization's mission and how they're structured

Cause IQ uses multiple fields to help categorize organizations, and the information is readily available so you can fully understand what an organization does and how it's structured. For example, you can access an organization's Types, Issues, Characteristics, and a detailed description at the top of their profile page. You can also find an organization's NTEE codes and NAICS codes at the bottom of the summary section of their profile page. Check out this article for more details on where to view an organization's category classifications, and here's a screenshot of the top of an organization's profile page highlighting some of their corresponding categories:

Determine if an organization can afford to work with your company

Cause IQ is chock-full of helpful and interesting nonprofit financial information. Cause IQ gives you access to vendor contract amounts (when available you'll see these in the vendors section) and fee-for-service expense fields, so you can understand an organization's spending habits, and ultimately, make the decision if they have the budget to purchase your products or services. For example, you can access the vendors section on an organization's profile to view how much an organization pays a fundraising consultant and the financials section to see how much the organization spends on accounting services, legal fees, management fees, etc. Check out this article to learn more about how you Can use Cause IQ to understand what an organization spends on service providers, and you can find a screenshot of the fee-fee-service fields in the financial section of an organization's profile below:

Cause IQ's quick fields (in the grey box at the top of organization profile pages) and key performance indicators (in the organization profile summary section) are customizable. We designed these features to allow you to bring the most relevant quantitative and qualitative organization details front and center so you can quickly view what matters to you most when researching individual nonprofits.

Here's a look at Cause IQ's quick fields on an organization's profile:

Here's a look at the key performance indicators (KPIs) section on an organization's profile page:

You can add almost all available Cause IQ fields to the quick fields up top and you can add all quantitative fields to your KPIs. For the quick fields, Cause IQ shows the most recent data value. For the KPIs, Cause IQ displays the most recent value, shows the percent change over the past year, and provides a line graph that shows how the fields' value has changed over the past five years.

For example, if you're a professional fundraiser, you can add the Fundraiser solicitor firms field to your quick fields and the Pro. fundraising fees field to your KPIs to quickly learn which fundraising firms an organization uses, how much they spend on third-party fundraising council, and how the fee-for-service field has changed for the organization over the years. If you care more about how much a nonprofit brings in from fundraising events, go ahead and add the All income from fundraising events field to the quick fields and/or KPIs.

To choose your quick fields and KPIs, click the "Settings" button at the top-right of an organization profile and select the desired fields. Once you choose your quick fields and KPIs on one profile, they become the defaults on all profiles that you visit.

Here's an overview video that quickly highlights the quick fields and KPIs again and shows you how to customize them:

To help you evaluate organizations and determine if they're the right fit for your company, Cause IQ offers two downloadable organization reports from a profile page. Cause IQ packages all available information (including the past five years of digitized financials) for a given organization in a detailed Excel report and offers a snapshot of the nonprofit with a PDF one-pager. You can download these reports for further analysis and email them throughout your office to share the insights you discover. To download an organization's detailed Excel report or PDF one-pager, click the "Download" button at the top of the profile and choose "Download one-page (PDF)" or "Download report (XLSX)" as appropriate.

Here's an overview video showing you where to download individual organization reports and what they offer:

If you would like to get in contact with Cause IQ to ask questions, share ideas, or to schedule a one-on-one web training, the easiest way to contact the Cause IQ team is from the orange-chat widget that you'll see at the bottom-right of this help center page and within the Cause IQ website.