What Are Charities?

We know you know what charities are, so sorry this heading is a little bit misleading. In the context of AntStorm though, the definition of charity necessarily gets a little more technical.

IRS Exempt Organizations

The organizations in the AntStorm charity database include all exempt organizations registered with the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Many of these organizations are charities by the IRS definition - i.e. they are 501(c) (3) organizations in accordance with IRS Publication 78. Others are exempt organizations of other kinds.

Not Exerting Too Much Control

We have intentionally started off with this broader set of exempt organizations to give our users the choice of which organizations you would like to support. While we could take more control and edit this list down more, we feel it's better to leave relatively more control in the hands of our users.

But Exerting Some Control to Avoid Fraud

On the other hand, we do want to be reasonably careful to try to avoid having our users defrauded by contributing the earnings from their trails to organizations that don't exist or that are set up by scam artists to collect money without using it for the greater good. So we use the IRS as the source of our list of charities and other non-profits organizations. We figure that the IRS will do a better job of screening these organizations than we ever could.

Executing Locally, Helping Globally

While the source of our charity database comes from the IRS, many organizations in the database have a global and not a US-centric focus. So our users in any part of the world can contribute to organizations that deliver aid and help people throughout the world. We would like to figure out how we can safely add local charities from other countries to our service, while doing our best to avoid the potential for fraud. If you have ideas about how we can do this, please feel free to contact us by email at suggestions@antstorm.com.