Charities are required to provide donors with receipts for charitable contributions over $250, which donors must have to substantiate their tax deductions.
While it's best practice to always send a donation receipt for every gift your organization receives, there are circumstances where a donation receipt is required by the IRS and must meet IRS guidelines, including: When single donations are greater than $250.
Nonprofit or charitable organizations typically create donation invoices after they've processed incoming donations. These organizations then send the donation invoices back to their donors.
All nonprofits with gross receipts above $50,000 are required to file an IRS Form 990 (or 990-EZ). The Form 990 is publicly available and may be found on the organization's page or on nonprofit databases such as GuideStar. (Note that the database may not be comprehensive.)
Legal requirements: The IRS requires donation receipts in certain situations. Failure to send a receipt can result in a penalty of $10 per contribution, up to $5,000 for each specific campaign.
The Nonprofit Data Search allows you to sift through Form 990 filing data for tens of thousands of nonprofit records to find and download details about their grant recipients, board members, vendors and other detailed financial information.
The receipt can take a variety of written forms – letters, formal receipts, postcards, computer-generated forms, etc. It's important to remember that without a written acknowledgment, the donor cannot claim the tax deduction.
Advocates of donor privacy believe the question was settled in 2021 with the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling in the case of Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. California Attorney General Rob Bonta. That ruling determined that California could not force nonprofits to submit lists of their major donors to the state.
Can I get a list of donors to an organization? The list of donors filed with Form 990 is specifically excluded from the information available for public inspection, except for donors to private foundations and political organizations.
Private foundations, including private corporate foundations, must publicly disclose all of their grants in their annual tax filings. You can use Foundation Directory to research foundations and see which nonprofits they give grants to.