Resources

This tip sheet from Following the Money:Investigating Nonprofits and Getting to Know 990s provides valuable information on documents available for tax-exempt organizations, tools for finding information on nonprofits, and Nonprofit Explorer tips.

Join Sunlight Research Center and Andrea Suozzo, lead maintainer of ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, for a deep dive into nonprofits and the financial records they file. After this session, you’ll be able to confidently navigate IRS Form 990s, spot red flags and uncover important details about nonprofit finances and operations.

This video lays out the steps for using Google Maps to identify the date range of when a construction project broke ground. We show you how to use Google Earth Pro to find additional images that are unavailable on Google Maps.

This video provides detailed instructions for finding the personal financial disclosures of a congressman and ascertaining notable changes in income that can raise important questions.

In this video, we provide step-by-step instructions to navigate the FEC website to find official campaign committee disbursements. Follow along as we explore spending details that are crucial for analysis.

In this video, we demonstrate how to analyze domain registrations using Whoxy, a domain search engine, and ViewDNS, a reverse IP lookup. We focus on domains linked to a specific email address. Follow along as we go through this process step by step.

This video will guide you through an example of verifying an individual's educational background. Here, we find Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' attorney license using the Florida Bar Association website. Instructions are provided on how to cross-reference this information to verify education claims on his campaign website.

Here we show how to navigate GovTrack. We demonstrate various ways to search this database and how to set up tracking notifications on an elected official. The video shows how to search for information on certain issues and how to check for committee information and assignments.

This demonstrates how to search the legislator misconduct database and set up tracking notifications on an elected member of Congress. It also shows what can be found on this website, including the accusations of misconduct and information on legislators missing roll call votes.

This video demonstrates how one could have checked for Burr's PTRs on the Senate efdSearch database.

This video shows how to navigate congress.gov and set up tracking notifications on a legislator.

This video demonstrates how to search USASpending to find information on grants and loans given to certain companies from the US government at the federal level.

Take a shot: In this demo, we talk about searching the SEC for nonprofits, private companies, and individuals. It's a good idea to search the SEC even if the company or individual isn't required to file. You never know what will pop up!

A UCC primer: Watch this demo to learn how to find Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings, documents that lenders use to show their legal right to assets a borrower uses to secure a loan. We will discuss what UCC filings are, what they can reveal, and how to find them. These are key because they can give information on a private company's finances, and the listed collateral can reveal assets owned by the company or individual, or even previously unknown LLCs.