Great Nonprofits

Nonprofit Manager Questions

1. How do I get reviews about my nonprofit on this site?

The best way to increase your popularity and people’s awareness of the existence of your nonprofit is by directing your volunteers, beneficiaries, and anyone who knows you to give you a review on our Web site www.greatnonprofits.org

2. How did I get listed on GreatNonprofits?

Anyone can list any nonprofit on GreatNonprofits and give them a review. If you don’t see your nonprofit on our site, go to http://www.greatnonprofits.org/nonprofits/add/ to add your nonprofit.

3. Does it cost anything to be listed on your site?

Having a GreatNonprofits account is free, listing nonprofits is free, reviewing is free, and reading is free.

4. Do I need to be listed already for someone to review my nonprofit?

Yes, if your nonprofit is not listed, then we have very simple step-by-step instructions on adding your nonprofit. You will receive an automatic e-mail as well as instructions on how to add our logo to your site. You can then direct people to GreatNonprofits and start increasing your popularity and credibility with all the positive reviews you might get.

5. How can I add a photo or description to my page?

Once your nonprofit is listed, there is a very simple step for adding photos: Simply click on “Edit my organization” and follow the instructions. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at

6. I see some nonprofits have a promotional video on their listing. How can I get one of those?

Similar to the add photo tab, click on “edit my organization”. Just follow the instructions for embedding a video from youtube.com, Blip or Revver URL and email us if you have any questions..

7. How can I get my nonprofit removed from your site or not receive reviews about it?

Deleting your nonprofit is simple and can be found under “My account” on our site, but first consider that, as a nonprofit, driving attention to your cause is a big priority. This is a free site with a very friendly navigation, and we would instead encourage you to ask your volunteers and beneficiaries to write reviews about you and increase your popularity and credibility.

8. My nonprofit has some bad reviews but we have fixed a few things. Can you remove the bad reviews?

nfortunately, in order to maintain the credibility of the reviews, we cannot remove the bad ones. This is a great chance to ask all the people who have seen your changes to write about their recent experience with you. We believe that the people judging you will understand the chronological factor and rely on newer reviews.

General Questions

9. My clients that I serve aren’t computer savvy. How can I collect reviews from them?

You simply print the PDF version of the Review form and hand them out to your clients. They can fill it out and then mail it back to GreatNonprofits. Our volunteers will enter the information into the website.

English Version
Spanish Version
Kids Version

10. What is it?

GreatNonprofits is a Web site with user reviews and ratings of nonprofits. Ask yourself, when was the last time you took a risk and tried a new restaurant, saw a movie, or bought a camcorder without checking out reviews by other consumers online? GreatNonprofits is bringing the same kind of “word on the street” recommendations to help donors and volunteers find good nonprofits.

11. Who writes your reviews?

These are user reviews. They are typically written by volunteers of the nonprofit, clients of the nonprofit, or other constituents.

12. How do you promote this site to donors and volunteers?

We’ve built the site to be easily found by search engines. If you have a nonprofit and you’ve been reviewed on GreatNonprofits, your reviews on GreatNonprofits will come up near the top of a search results page every time someone searches your name. We also work with online and off-line media to promote the site. See our Press section for media coverage.

13. Are you worried about people gaming the site? Posting fake reviews?

In general, we think the nonprofit sector has a lot of integrity, so we don’t expect a lot of people trying to game this site. However, like the majority of sites on the Internet, there’s no way for us to verify each posted review. As with all things on the Internet, you have to use your judgment. Read the reviews, and judge for yourself which one sounds credible. Overall, we think people will be honest and the reviews will provide some useful insights. Take Amazon’s book reviews, for instance. Yes, there are some self-promoting authors, but is the book-buying world better because of people’s ability to post their reviews on Amazon? Or is it worse? Most people would agree, we think, that it is better.

14. How will you get enough reviews?

The average person reads three to five reviews on a product before making a decision. It would be most helpful if each nonprofit got that many reviews.

15. What is your scaling strategy? How do you reach nonprofits?

Many nonprofits simply find us online and voluntarily list themselves so that they can be reviewed. We also work with local nonprofits, usually through nonprofit associations, like the Greater Pittsburgh Nonprofit Partnership, which has more than 300 nonprofit members to market our site to nonprofits. In San Francisco, we’ve been working with specific nonprofits that are interested in raising their public awareness – SFConnect and StreetTech. And they understand that it’s so easy to raise their profile: With one mass e-mail to their list of former students or volunteers, they can get a lot of genuine, compelling, testimonials online that the whole world can see. It gives local nonprofits credibility for people to see and read about all these firsthand stories of people who’ve benefited from them. We’d also be glad to hear from you if you think your city or your network of nonprofits or foundations want to bring this level of transparency to your community.

16. What is your business model?

We are funded by individual donations and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. We also receive support from the local partners – both monetary as well as staff time.

17. I’m interested in helping GreatNonprofits. How can I help?

You can help GreatNonprofits by spreading the word and sharing your feedback. We also have some positions open. Drop us a line at

18. Do I need permission to post one of your reviews on my website?

There is no need to ask for permission to quote from our site. Simply use attribution "GreatNonprofits.org User review".

Reviewer Questions

19. How do I write a review?

Writing a review is very simple. The first thing you want to do is look for the nonprofit you would like to review. On our main page you can click on the “Write a review” tab and search for it. Once there, simply click on the nonprofit and then click once again on the button that says “Write a review” on the nonprofit page.

20. Who will read my review?

Anybody who goes to that page will have access to that review as well as the organization that you write the review about.

21. Can anyone write a review?

We ask that the nonprofit’s founder and people who currently work in a paid position for the organization refrain from writing reviews about themselves. Unpaid board members, clients, volunteers, partners, and other stakeholders are welcome to write reviews.

22. My profile looks like it's for an individual user. Did I set up my account as an organization?

That's actually the right page and it does look a bit like a profile. When you click on "my account", it will take you to a page that has all your personal information, however if you would like to edit your organization you have to click on the "My Page" tab and on the right hand side of that page you will see all the organizations you have registered, as well as anything you are a member of. Once you click on any of those organizations which you created, you will have access to edit its contents.