Pactman Nonprofit Check Plus API

Say you're building a donation feature, a grant portal or a workplace giving program. Before money moves, someone has to confirm that the organization on the other end is a real tax-exempt nonprofit, that the IRS hasn't revoked its status and that it isn't on a sanctions list. The answers sit in separate government files, published in different formats and refreshed on their own schedules.

Pactman's Nonprofit Check Plus API rolls those lookups into one call. You send an EIN, the nine-digit tax ID a U.S. nonprofit is filed under, and get back a JSON record. The landing page puts the pitch bluntly: "Spend engineering time on your product, not government datasets and matching logic."

The public API spec shows two endpoints. One looks up a single EIN. The other takes a batch of up to 50. Both use a Bearer token.

The data comes from four sources named in the FAQ: the IRS Business Master File, Publication 78, the IRS automatic revocation list and the OFAC sanctions list. In practice that gets you the organization's name and address, whether it appears in Pub 78, its subsection and foundation codes, any revocation and reinstatement dates, and a plain-text OFAC status. A handy extra is a flag for when the Business Master File and Pub 78 disagree. The record describes organizations, and the schema has no fields for officers or other individuals.

Pactman says it polls its sources daily and updates its database when something changes. Requests are capped at 3 per second. The docs also print a demo key that works for five sample EINs, so you can look at a real response before you sign up.

The free Basic plan allows up to 200 checks a month with no credit card. Two conditions matter. It's one per company, and Gmail and other free email addresses aren't eligible. Free-tier users must also show "Data provided by Pactman.org" wherever the data appears. Premier is $99 a month for up to 3,000 checks with a 14-day trial, and custom plans start at $166. On every plan, the terms prohibit reselling or redistributing the data.

A few things to weigh. The endpoints cover U.S. organizations only. The landing page mentions searching by organization information, but the documented endpoints take an EIN. And the privacy policy was last updated on October 23, 2023. It reads as a general website policy about accounts, cookies and Google Analytics, and it doesn't address API keys or request logs, so ask about those if your compliance file needs an answer.

The service is run by Pledge Software, a U.S. company based in Frisco, Texas. Pactman itself is its marketplace connecting nonprofits with volunteers and donors.

If nonprofit verification is sitting on your backlog, grab the demo key and run the sample EINs. Ten minutes with the response will tell you whether it replaces the spreadsheet job you were dreading.