Donor Due Diligence
Civly Nonprofits

Before you accept the gift, know what you are accepting.

Send us a name — a major donor, a prospective board member, a corporate partner. We hand back a dated, sourced, analyst-reviewed report: litigation, criminal and regulatory exposure, business entanglements, adverse media, political giving, and anything else that would embarrass the organization if a reporter found it first.

Run a Report See what is in it

Returning a gift costs more than declining one.

A hire can be let go. A gift has already been announced, thanked, spent, and in the worst case carved into the front of the building. By the time the story runs, the organization is not deciding whether to accept — it is deciding how to explain. The window where diligence is cheap is the one before the pledge agreement is signed.

The board already asked for this

Most gift acceptance policies say the organization will decline gifts that conflict with its mission or damage its reputation. Very few say how anyone is supposed to know. This is the missing step between the policy and the vote.

A search engine is not diligence

An afternoon of searching finds what is on page one about a common name. It does not find the entity three steps removed, the consent order in a state regulator's docket, or the fact that a peer organization quietly returned the same donor's money in 2021.

Mission conflict is the real risk

The finding that hurts is rarely a crime. It is the health organization taking money from an industry it lobbies against, or the environmental group naming a wing after a defendant in a pollution suit. We read every finding against what your organization is actually for.

What comes back

Every finding is dated, attributed to a primary source, graded for how much it should weigh on the decision, and read by an analyst before it reaches you.

Civly Gift Acceptance ReportProspective naming gift · $1.5M Illustrative example
Weigh heavily
Consent order with a state environmental regulatorEntity the subject controls · 2022 · state agency docket
Penalty paid, no admission of liability. Matters here because the organization’s advocacy program names the same industry.Primary document attached
Ask about it
Civil suit brought by a former business partnerFederal district court · filed 2019 · settled 2021, terms sealed
Allegations were not tested and the docket is thin. Reported so the development lead is not surprised by it, not as a conclusion.Docket and filings attached
Ask about it
Board seat at an organization your grant makes payments toIRS 990, Part VII · tax years 2021–2024
Not a conflict on its face — it is a related-party disclosure your auditor will want, and better found now than at the audit.990 filings attached
Context
Political giving: 41 federal and state contributions since 2016FEC and state disclosure · both parties, weighted one way
Reported factually. Whether it bears on the decision is the board’s call, not ours.Itemized, with filing IDs
Nothing found
Criminal record, sanctions and exclusion lists, bankruptcy, tax liensSearched, dated, and reported as clear
A clean search is a finding. It is written down with the date so the file shows what was checked and when.
Illustrative. Names, entities and figures are invented; the structure, the grading and the sourcing standard are how a real report reads.

Three Subjects, One Standard

Same sources and same gates — a different report depending on who the subject is and what the organization is about to commit to.

The major donor

  1. Run before the pledge, not after the announcement — ideally at the point the gift becomes specific enough to have a number and a naming condition attached.
  2. Trace where the money is from — the entities behind the wealth, not just the individual, since that is where regulatory and litigation history lives.
  3. Read it against your mission — the question is not whether the donor is a good person, it is whether this specific gift is defensible in your specific organization.
  4. Check the peer record — adverse coverage of gifts returned, declined, or renamed elsewhere.

The prospective board member

  1. Fiduciary standard, not a hiring standard — this person will be legally responsible for the organization, and their record becomes the organization’s record.
  2. Map the other boards — every nonprofit and corporate seat, pulled from filings, run against your grantees, vendors and funders for conflicts.
  3. Cover the financial gates — bankruptcy, liens, judgments, and exclusion lists that would disqualify a director outright.
  4. Deliver a page the governance committee can actually use — findings, grades, and the open questions worth raising in the interview.

The corporate partner

  1. Vet the company and the people signing — a sponsorship carries the counterparty’s reputation into your marketing, under your logo.
  2. Regulatory and enforcement history — agency actions, consent orders, and litigation in the sector you operate in.
  3. Check the claims — what the company says publicly about the cause it is sponsoring, measured against its filings and its record.
  4. Set the review cadence — multi-year partnerships get re-run, because the risk arrives after the contract is signed.

What it takes to become a finding

These reports are about real people, and a wrong one does real damage to someone who did nothing. So the bar to print something is high, and it is the same bar every time.

Identity before anything else

  1. Anchor the subject on name, location, employer, entities and known affiliations before a single search runs.
  2. Exclude the strangers — same-name individuals are named and set aside explicitly, so a common name does not inherit another person’s record.
  3. Say so when we are unsure — a record we cannot confidently attach to the subject is reported as unattributed or left out, never quietly included.

Primary sources, dated

  1. Every finding carries its document — the docket, the filing, the order, the disclosure, not a summary of one.
  2. Every finding carries a date, so the board can weigh a 2004 matter differently from a 2024 one.
  3. No rumour, no anonymous claims, and nothing that was not lawfully public to begin with. We do not access private accounts or buy data that should not exist.

An analyst reads it before you do

  1. Machine breadth, human judgment — automation finds candidate records; a person decides what is a finding and what is noise.
  2. Grades are argued, not scored — each grade comes with the reason it earned that weight for your organization specifically.
  3. Fair to the subject — when a matter is old enough, minor enough, or resolved, that is stated plainly rather than left for the reader to assume the worst.

Works with the rest of Civly

Diligence is one step in a cycle that starts with finding the money and ends with what people say about you afterwards.

Grant Matching →

The other side of the same question. Grant Matching finds the funders whose money already reaches work like yours; this decides whether a particular gift is safe to take.

Social Listening & Clips →

Diligence is a snapshot. Listening is the standing watch — on your organization, your named donors and your partners — so a developing story reaches you before it reaches your board chair.

Executive Vetting →

The same discipline pointed at a hire rather than a gift. For an executive director search or a senior appointment, where the question is what you are taking on rather than what you are accepting.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is this different from Executive Vetting? +
Same sources and the same evidence standard, a different question. Executive Vetting asks whether to bring someone inside the organization as a hire. Donor Due Diligence asks whether accepting money, a board seat, or a sponsorship creates a liability, and it reads every finding against your mission and your gift acceptance policy rather than against a job description.
What sources do you actually run? +
Court dockets and opinions, state and federal regulatory actions, corporate and entity registries, securities filings, liens, judgments and property records, sanctions and exclusion lists, IRS 990 filings for board and officer positions, federal and state campaign finance disclosure, and news across hundreds of outlets. Every finding names which one it came from.
How long does a report take? +
Days, not weeks, and we will tell you the turnaround before you commit rather than after. If a board vote is on a fixed date, say so when you send the name and we will work to it. What we will not do is skip the analyst review to make a deadline — an unreviewed report is worse than a late one.
Does the donor find out we ran a report? +
Not from us. The research runs entirely against public records and published sources — there are no interviews, no pretext calls, and nothing that touches the subject or people around them. Many organizations do tell donors that a review is standard practice under their gift acceptance policy, which is a reasonable thing to be able to say plainly.
What if the report finds nothing? +
That is a result worth having and worth keeping. A clean report, dated and listing exactly which sources were searched, is the documentation that shows the board met its duty of care. Most reports land there. The value is in being able to prove the question was asked, not in finding something every time.
Can we run this on donors we have already accepted? +
Yes, and organizations often start there — a retrospective pass over named gifts, current board members, and standing corporate partners. It is the same report run defensively: you learn what a reporter would learn, while there is still time to decide how you would answer.

Send us a name

Tell us who the subject is, what the organization is being asked to accept, and when the decision has to be made. We will tell you what the report will cover and how fast it can be in front of your board.

Run a Report