How to build a nonprofit directory that turns goodwill into volunteers.

Serve the person who wants to help but does not know where.

Two kinds of people search a nonprofit directory. The first wants to give time: a retiree with free mornings, a student who needs service hours, a company planning a team volunteer day. The second wants help: a family looking for a food pantry, a tenant looking for free legal advice, a parent looking for an after-school program. Both end up on search results full of national brands, outdated volunteer boards and pages from organizations that closed years ago.

Small local nonprofits are the ones most often missed. A tenants' rights clinic run by three volunteers has no marketing budget, and its only web presence may be a Facebook page.

Pick your angle

• One community, every cause. A county guide to charities, food banks, shelters, youth programs and volunteer roles.
• One cause across a wider area: animal rescues in a state, literacy programs in a region, veterans' organizations nationwide.
• One audience: volunteer roles for teenagers, skilled volunteering for professionals, or bilingual services for recent immigrants.

Today this trade in goodwill happens through volunteer centers, United Way offices, library bulletin boards, church announcements, school counselors handing out photocopied lists, and Facebook posts asking "who needs volunteers this Saturday?"

Your directory wins when a small charity with no website gets found as easily as a national one.

Charge the businesses that want to be seen doing good.

Charging charities to appear in a charity directory feels wrong to most people, and it leaves gaps. Keep the basic organization page free. The money comes from visibility, sponsorship and organizations that want more than a page.

• Featured places work for nonprofits running a campaign: a capital appeal, a volunteer drive before a big event, a toy drive in December.
• Memberships for larger nonprofits that manage several programs and want to post volunteer roles every month.
• Local business sponsors are the strongest source. Banks, credit unions, hospitals and law firms often have community budgets and like being shown next to local causes.
• Sponsored pages for days of service, such as a Giving Tuesday guide or a holiday volunteering page, can carry a sponsor's name.

Never let payment change whether a charity is listed or how it is described. Label featured places clearly and keep the free listing complete. Sponsors want to be associated with trust, so protecting it protects your income too.

Launch in the fall, ahead of the giving season.

Interest in volunteering and giving climbs from October to the end of December, with peaks around Thanksgiving, Giving Tuesday and the last week of the year. A second, smaller rush comes in January with New Year resolutions and the Day of Service. Launching in early fall gives your pages time to be found.

First community and partners

• Pick one county where you know the volunteer center or the community foundation.
• High school counselors and college service offices need a list of places where students can earn hours, and will share yours every term.
• Employers planning volunteer days want a list of group-friendly roles.
• Local news covers new ways to help, especially in November.

Launch checklist

1. At least a hundred organizations listed, every cause covered.
2. Thirty with at least one specific volunteer role.
3. Registration checked for every organization that takes donations.
4. Teen, family and corporate volunteering pages built.
5. A holiday volunteering page ready by early November.
6. Counselors and the volunteer center sent the link before the term starts.

In January, email every organization to ask what help it needs for spring, and update the volunteer roles.

A worked example: Clear Fork Volunteer Hub, north-central Ohio.

Picture a fictional site called Clear Fork Volunteer Hub, serving Richland County in north-central Ohio, with Mansfield at its center and smaller towns such as Shelby, Ontario and Bellville around it. It is invented, but its choices are the ones a founder of any local nonprofit directory has to make.

How the causes are arranged

• Hunger and housing
  • Food pantries
  • Shelters and warming centers
• Animals
• Kids and schools
  • Tutoring and mentoring
  • Summer meal sites
• Older adults
  • Meal delivery
  • Rides to appointments
• Parks, rivers and trails

Who uses it

Three groups arrive every week. High school students hunt for roles that count toward graduation service hours and accept fifteen-year-olds. Retirees, many of them former factory and hospital staff, look for a regular weekday shift. And households under strain look up which pantry is open on a Thursday evening, which is why every pantry page shows its distribution hours at the very top. Eligibility comes right after, written as a plain sentence rather than a list of program codes.

How it got going

The founder managed volunteers for a youth soccer league and kept hearing the same question from parents: where can my teenager help out? She pulled the registered charities in the county from the public register, added the pantries, church ministries and mutual aid groups she knew personally, and ended up with around a hundred and forty organizations. The coordinator of a hospital auxiliary and the county's community foundation each sent her a partner list. Counselors at three high schools agreed to share the link at the start of the spring term, and student visits arrived within a week.

The hardest part was not finding organizations but getting specific roles out of them. She solved it by asking every coordinator the same question on the phone: what is one shift you could fill next month? Most answered on the spot, and she wrote the role while they talked.

How it makes money

No organization pays to be listed. A credit union sponsors the teen volunteering page, a regional hospital sponsors the older adults section, and a law firm and an insurance agency hold banner spaces on the donation pages. During the December food drive, the largest pantry bought a featured place on the hunger page for three weeks, labeled as featured, and asked to repeat it for the summer meals campaign. The founder turns down any sponsor that wants a say in which organizations appear, and says so on the About page.

Every organization here is fictional.

The first 90 days, from a list of charities to a list of ways to help.

The first three months of a nonprofit directory are about one change: turning a list of organizations into a list of specific ways to help. A page that says volunteers are welcome gets ignored. A page that says Thursday pantry shift, 4 to 7 pm, ages 16 and up, gets a phone call. Most of your weeks should go into collecting those roles from coordinators.

Time the plan against the school calendar and the giving season. Counselors share resources at the start of each term, and charities plan holiday drives in early fall, so a twelve-week run that ends in late October or mid-January lands at the right moment. Save sponsor conversations for the last two weeks, when you can show real pages and real visits.

Check registration as you go rather than at the end. Any organization asking for donations needs its status confirmed before launch, and finding a problem in week eleven is far more awkward than finding it in week two, when nobody has shared the page yet. Keep one list of every organization with its status, the date you checked it and where you checked, so you can answer a sponsor or a journalist in minutes.

Ways to build a nonprofit directory, compared.

A nonprofit directory serves two audiences on the same pages: people who want to help, and people who need help. Fields for volunteer age, background checks and time commitment sit beside fields for eligibility, languages and walk-in hours. It also holds many small organizations that will never log in, so you need an easy way to build and update pages on their behalf, and to import partner lists in bulk.

Custom development

Paying developers makes sense if you plan something specific to the sector, such as volunteer hour records that schools accept, or a shift sign-up tool. Be honest about whether that is your project or a different one; plenty of founders build the tracker and never finish the directory. If you do go this way, start with the directory anyway, because it tells you which features coordinators actually ask for.

Your own server with a script or plugin

WordPress directory plugins and standalone scripts handle the listing side well, and some founders get donated hosting from a local firm. The cost is your time on updates and on blocking spam registrations, which charity sites attract in volume.

A hosted builder

A hosted builder such as Yclas keeps the software running, so your time goes to coordinators and counselors. Before choosing any builder, test checkbox filters for ways to help, claiming by organizations, a spreadsheet import for partner lists, and moderation that holds new listings for approval. Those four decide whether you can keep a hundred small organizations accurate on your own.

What a nonprofit directory costs to run.

The software is the smallest part of the bill. Most of the cost is your time in the first months: finding the first listings, answering questions and checking what gets posted.

Public charity registers are generally free to search, while Google Places imports run on your own key and cost depends on volume. If you want to verify organizations more thoroughly, some paid charity data services exist, but most founders start with the free registers and a phone call.

Mistakes that stall nonprofit directories.

• Listing causes instead of roles. A page full of mission statements reads like a donor brochure. Volunteers want a task, a time and an age limit. Ask every coordinator for one concrete role before you call the page finished.
• Leaving out unregistered groups. Mutual aid networks, tenant groups and neighborhood associations often do the most hands-on work. Without them the directory looks like a copy of the charity register. List them with their status shown plainly and a note that donors should check before giving.
• Approving everything after a disaster. Fake appeals surge in the days after a flood or fire, often under names one letter away from a real charity. Hold anything that mentions the event for review and check each group against the register before it goes live. Point donors to the established relief groups already on your site, which is a better service than an empty page.
• Letting roles go stale. A volunteer who calls about a shift that was filled last spring may not try again. Put a review date on every role and remove those nobody has confirmed in three months. Summer and holiday roles need their own dates, since they vanish the week the season ends.
• Forgetting the people who need help. Many founders build for volunteers and overlook that pantries and clinics are searched by families in trouble. Put hours, eligibility and walk-in rules at the top of service pages, in plain words and in the languages spoken locally. Someone looking for food tonight will not scroll past a history of the organization to find the opening time.
• Promising tax deductions. Whether a gift is deductible depends on the organization's status and the giver's situation. Show registration as a fact and leave deduction advice to the organizations and to tax professionals.
• Pitching only executive directors. They are short of time and wary of new platforms. Volunteer coordinators, development staff and active board members gain most from more volunteers, and they are the ones who keep pages current. Ask the director for a name, then build the relationship with that person.
• Making students do the detective work. Teens need roles that accept under-18s, count for school hours and come with a signed record of time. A clear field for each spares counselors from repeating the same answer all term, and keeps students coming back. Ask coordinators whether they sign hour sheets before you tick the box for them.
• Charging charities for basic pages. Fees leave gaps, and gaps make the directory look incomplete to sponsors and visitors alike. Keep the page free and earn from sponsors and campaigns instead.

Glossary for nonprofit directory founders.

Coordinators, funders and counselors use these terms, so learn them before your first round of calls.