How to Find What You're Looking for at GuideStar

Explore many organizations

or

Find a specific organization
  • Typing a single term such as university will usually return more organizations than you want. Try typing multiple words in the search box.
    Example: new york university medical will give you a manageable list of universities in New York that work, research, or teach in the field of medicine.
  • Organizations are listed in the search results in order of relevance.
  • GuideStar Select and GuideStar Premium subscribers can use the sort tool to reorder the organizations list.

    sort by dropdown

    Sort options are different for Select and Premium subscribers. These are the options:

    Select

    • Relevancy
    • Organization name, A-Z
    • Organization name, Z-A
    • City
    • State

    Premium

    • Relevancy
    • Organization name, A-Z
    • Organization name, Z-A
    • City
    • State
    • Zip
    • Fiscal year
    • NTEE Code
    • Income, high-low
    • Income, low-high
    • Form 990 available
    • Other documents available
    • IRS subsection
  • GuideStar Select and GuideStar Premium subscribers can use the category links to the right of the search results to refine their lists.
    categories example
    GuideStar Select users can access City and State categories; GuideStar Premium users can access all categories shown here.
  • See more tips below on using special syntax to improve your searches.
  
  • Type the organization's name in the search box with quotation marks.
    Example: "new york university" will put New York University at the top of your results.

Relevance

Our search engine uses a complex algorithm to sort organizations by relevance, according to your criteria. Relevancy is based on a number of factors:
  • Name
  • City, State, Zip Code
  • Keyword frequency and position in a number of text fields
  • Organization size (based on assets and income)
The search engine looks at numerous fields of information for each organization to decide its relevancy.

Find People

GuideStar Premium subscribers can use the People Search feature to search more than 3.3 million records. For best results use a person's first and last name or the full organization name with which the individual may be affiliated.

To start a new People Search from a People Results or People Report page, enter new criteria in the quick search box at the top right of the page. Use the category links at the right of People Results to refine your results.

Special Syntax

  • Phrase search

    Use quotation marks ( " " ) to search for an exact phrase: "united nations" will return results where the words united nations appear beside each other in the text.

  • Wildcards

    • Use a question mark to replace a single character anywhere in a word:
      te?t finds test and text.
    • Use an asterisk ( * ) to replace multiple characters anywhere in a word:
      hous* will return results with house as well as housing.

  • Stop words

    Our search recognizes stop words (nonessential, frequently used words, such as a, and, because, if, often, the, when) and rewrites your query without them, unless they are entered in quotation marks.

  • Excluding words

    Narrow your search by using a hyphen (be sure to space before the hyphen):
    child -care will return results containing the term child but exclude those that also contain the term care.

  • Acronyms

    Our search recognizes some acronyms (e.g., PTA), but relevancy is improved when you type the entire organization name or keywords.