Search Tips

Find a specific organization

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.

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.

Explore many organizations

• 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.

Search Facts

• Network for Good's search is powered by GuideStar for donations and by VolunteerMatch for volunteer opportunities. If you check both boxes to search simultaneously for 'donate' and 'volunteer', you will get tabbed results with the respective oppportunities.
• The GuideStar search engine scans the name, description, and NTEE codes of each organization's GuideStar Report for the search term(s).
• The search is not case sensitive. For example, searching on Network for Good, network for good, Network for good, network foR GooD, or any other combination of the word will return the same search results.
• Each search results page lists a maximum of 1,000 organizations.