How does my nonprofit get approved?

Register with your organisation's details and EIN. One nonprofit per account, and an EIN that is already registered here is refused.

Before you can submit for review you need a logo, and evidence of your charitable status. If your EIN is confirmed against the IRS record under your registered name, that is the evidence and there is no letter to find. If it cannot be confirmed, your 501(c)(3) determination letter is what stands in.

When you submit, your EIN is checked against public IRS records and the registered name is compared against the name on your application. If everything lines up, the application is approved without waiting for anyone. Approval happens automatically only when all of these are true at once: the EIN is confirmed as an active 501(c)(3), the registered name matches the name you applied under, Stripe payout onboarding is finished, a logo is on file, and your name, mission and description do not trip the same word watchlist that screens listings.

Anything short of all of that goes to a person, with the reasons recorded on the application. The automatic check never rejects anything — it only decides whether a person needs to look.

An admin cannot approve an organisation that is missing a logo, evidence of charitable status, or payout onboarding. Those are prerequisites rather than preferences.

There is no published review time, and nobody can tell you whether or when your application will be approved.

If your application is declined you can put yourself back in the queue up to 2 times on your own, with at least 24 hours between submissions — measured from your own last submission, so correcting a document does not restart the clock. After that, or if your organisation has been suspended, it takes a conversation with us.

You can connect Stripe before you are approved. Doing it early is sensible: it is one of the things approval requires.