People Search and Knowledge Base Search

Most people, GuideStar Premium subscribers included, come to GuideStar to look up nonprofit organizations. But did you know that with GuideStar Premium, you can also search for individuals in the nonprofit sector by name and for articles and news releases posted on GuideStar?

Learn more about people search
Learn more about knowledge base search

People Search

Find out which nonprofits an individual is associated with as a board member, key staff member, or highest-paid employee. This information is pulled from data the organizations report on their IRS Forms 990, 990-EZ, or 990-PF.

Click the arrow above the search box on the home page and select People Search from the drop-down menu.
The search box also appears at the top of most of the other pages on our site.
Type in the name you wish to search.
For this example, we're using GuideStar's own president and CEO, Bob Ottenhoff.
Searching by Bob's given name, Robert, brings up three organizations that list a Robert Ottenhoff on their 990s, including GuideStar:
Fortunately, Ottenhoff is an uncommon name, and all three of these results refer to GuideStar's Bob Ottenhoff. You'll probably have to weed out extraneous results when searching for people with less distinctive names.
You can also refine your results by state and city using the categories in the light blue bar.
Click on the individual's name to learn more.
You'll go to the "People" tab of the organization's GuideStar Premium report. A box summarizing the information reported for that individual, including title and compensation, will pop up.
To return to your search results, either click the link in the pop-up box or, if you've closed the box, click the link above the organization's name on the left.
You may want to search variations of the individual's name as well.
Searching "Bob Ottenhoff" brought up an additional result for GuideStar's president.
Remember that in database searches, less can be more.
Leave out middle initials, prefixes such as "Dr." or "Fr.," and suffixes such as "Jr.," "Sr.," and "II." We list the names as they appear on the 990s, and nonprofits don't always include middle initials or the other items.

Knowledge Base Search

We've published hundreds of articles and news releases on topics ranging from nonprofit accountability to fundraising to Web sites and Internet strategy. GuideStar Premium's knowledge base search lets you search these pages by keyword.

Click the arrow above the search box and select Knowledge Base Search from the drop-down menu.
The search box appears on our home page and at the top of every page of our site.
Type in the keyword(s) you wish to search.
For this example, we searched "revocation*" to find articles and releases about automatic revocation of tax-exempt status. The asterisk is a wildcard that enables the search to bring up pages with either "revocation" or "revocations" in them.
Our search produced 20 results. You'll see a title, text snippet, author, and summary for each one.
Use the categories to refine your search results. You can also change the order in which the results appear.
1. Article Category. We assign a topical category to every article and news release we post. Article category lets you use these categories to refine your results.
2. Article Content. Newsletter articles fall into the "News" category. News releases fall into the "Press Release" category. You can select either option to refine your search results.
3. Sort Results By. "Relevancy" is the default order for the knowledge base search results. Use the drop-down menu to change the sort order to ascending date or descending date, or to return it to relevancy.
Click "Read More" (item d in the screen shot) to read the entire article or release.