Benevity’s nonprofit due diligence framework helps you manage risk and maintain the integrity of your corporate purpose initiatives by ensuring only legitimate, secure, and trustworthy nonprofits engage with your programs. This multi-layered approach enables confident giving, volunteering, and granting decisions while adapting to the needs and risk tolerance of your company.
The framework is built around four core components—Validation, Verification, Vetting, and Investigation—each designed to assess nonprofit eligibility, compliance, and reputation from different perspectives. Each service is structured to progressively deepen the level of review:
- Validation confirms nonprofit legitimacy and platform eligibility.
- Verification supports secure onboarding and protects against fraud.
- Vetting provides advanced risk insights to help align with corporate values.
- Investigation enables responsive issue management when concerns arise.
Together, these layers help you deliver programs that are values-aligned, secure, and resilient.
Validation: Establishing platform eligibility
Validation is the foundational step in Benevity’s due diligence. It confirms whether a nonprofit is legitimate and qualifies to appear in the Benevity Causes Portal. A nonprofit must be validated to receive donations or engage with your giving or volunteering programs.
Validation methods include:
- Government registry sync with official government databases in specific countries.
- Official document reviews for organizations not available in a government registry sync.
- Sanctions and watchlist screening, where nonprofits are screened against global risk lists by Benevity’s in-house vetting experts.
If a nonprofit becomes invalid, its profile is automatically deactivated to prevent disbursements.
Verification: Safeguarding your program
Verification focuses on ensuring the people and payment details behind nonprofit profiles are legitimate. This includes:
- User verification, which monitors for unusual profile claims and suspicious login behavior.
- EFT verification, which confirms bank account details and ownership to prevent fraud.
- ToU adherence, which monitors a nonprofit’s compliance with the Causes Terms of Use for engaging with Benevity.
These checks help protect your program from the reputational and financial risks associated with fraud.
Vetting: Supporting values-based decision-making
Vetting offers a deeper look into how a nonprofit operates, helping you make informed decisions based on your organization’s unique risk tolerance. It includes:
- Nonprofit Program Eligibility Rulesets, which provide controls to define nonprofit criteria that reflect your values and risk tolerance.
- Adverse Media Reports, an optional, paid reporting service providing weekly alerts on potential risks (such as fraud, abuse, or regulatory issues) drawn from global news sources through Benevity’s in-house validation services.
- Key Personnel Screening, an optional, paid service to screen a nonprofit’s board members for risk factors related to adverse media, politically exposed persons, and watchlists or sanctions.
- Premium Nonprofit Screening, an optional, paid service that expands on key personnel screening, including a broader assessment of potential issues with a nonprofit’s reputation or operations, summarizing the overall risk in each area.
Benevity’s optional services give you greater visibility into reputational risks so you can align nonprofit eligibility with your program’s standards.
Investigation: Responding to concerns
If concerns arise—such as a potential sanctions match or risk flagged in media—Benevity may conduct an internal investigation.
- Transaction monitoring involves analyzing donation and volunteering data to identify unusual patterns, anomalies, or potential misuse, fraud, or policy misalignment.
- Third-party reporting and investigation provides a channel for raising concerns about nonprofits on our platform, enabling our due diligence team to review and ensure compliance with our Terms of Use and eligibility guidelines.
- Legal and compliance investigations involve reviews by Benevity to ensure transactions and nonprofits meet legal and platform standards, or to assess a nonprofit’s global compliance with laws and regulations, potentially involving external regulatory bodies.
Benevity’s layered approach to nonprofit due diligence empowers you to give with confidence—protecting your people, your brand, and your impact.
For more information, browse the links in this article.
- Learn more about Nonprofit Eligibility and Trust