1.7 Million Nonprofits Are Listed on GivingFountain. Only 2 of Them Signed Up.

A nonprofit directory launched this summer lists 1,682,903 American charities, describes every one of them as a “Vetted Organization,” and will take a donation for any of them for a fixed 8% fee. Two of those organizations have signed up.

GivingFountain.org is run by The Giving Fountain, Inc., an Indiana nonprofit that received its IRS determination letter in June 2026. Its directory is built automatically from the IRS file of tax-exempt organizations. The American Red Cross is in it. So are Feeding America, the ASPCA, Catholic Charities USA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Heart Association. None of them claimed their page. All of them have a working Donate Now button.

What a $250 gift actually delivers

Open a listing, click Donate Now, and the checkout arrives with that nonprofit already loaded at 100% of the gift and $250 preselected. The summary panel on the right carries a bold blue heading: NO HIDDEN FEES. Directly beneath it are two fees.

• An 8% “disbursement fee,” charged on every gift, which the site says covers “fund distribution and platform operations.”
• A 3% card processing fee. Donors can check a box to cover it. The box starts unchecked.

Both come out of the nonprofit’s payout rather than being added to the donor’s total. On a $250 gift with the box left alone, the charity is due $222.50. GivingFountain’s own transparency page works the example at a larger number: “$1,000 by card — Disbursement fee $80 — Processing fee $30 — Nonprofit receives $890.”

That is the disclosure working as intended, and it is more than several platforms in our shadow donation directory offer. The harder question is what the 8% buys for an organization that never asked to be there.

Adam Lowy, founder and executive director of Move For Hunger—one of the organizations listed without claiming its page—said the fee and use of the nonprofit’s name crossed a line.

“I can’t understand why any nonprofit would agree to an 8% processing fee. It’s incredibly important to be good stewards to the donors and donations that come in to support our mission. When platforms like this target donors to make 8% off the goodwill we’ve built over nearly 2 decades, it just feels dishonest.”

Adam Lowy, Founder & Executive Director, Move For Hunger

Two claimed out of 1.68 million

GivingFountain publishes a public search API, which makes the scale of participation easy to measure. Filtering the directory for organizations that have claimed their listing returns two: Luminary Arts Corporation and the Amazon Conservation Association. Both appear in the “Featured” row on the directory’s front page, tagged “Newly Claimed.” The platform’s campaigns page reported $0 raised from 0 donations on the day we looked.

We checked one nationally recognized charity in each of the directory’s ten cause categories. Every one was listed, unclaimed, and donatable.

The Terms say the quiet part plainly

Section 8 of GivingFountain’s Terms of Service is unusually direct about how the directory is built:

“Our directory itself is compiled from public records published by the IRS, so an organization may be listed without having registered with us, agreed to these Terms, or taken any action at all.”

Compiling public IRS data is ordinary. ProPublica, Charity Navigator and GuideStar all do it, and nobody objects. The difference is the checkout. A directory that describes an organization is a reference work. A directory that collects money in that organization’s name, keeps 8%, and issues the donor’s tax receipt in its own name is something else.

There is a tension in the language, too. Every listing page’s description calls the organization “a verified 501(c)(3) nonprofit on GivingFountain,” and the directory header counts “1,682,903 Vetted Organizations.” The platform’s own API returns is_verified: false for the listings we checked, including the ASPCA’s. The site’s explanation of its vetting, on its What We Do page, is that “our directory is built from the IRS’s own records of tax-exempt organizations, and only organizations with active tax-exempt status are listed.” Being in the IRS file is the vetting.

Listings also republish Charity Navigator Encompass scores under a “Powered by Charity Navigator” label — a third party’s trust signal, displayed on a page the rated charity never approved.

Not only the above, the the platforms terms state plainly that “While we strive for accuracy, AI-generated content may occasionally contain inaccurate, incomplete, or outdated information. You should independently verify any information provided by the AI before relying on it.” While this candor might be appreciated, the brand risks, donor confusion risks, and unclear policies around how money gets delivered and to whom and when (and what happens when it doesn’t) leaves far too much ambiguity within the whole pipeline.

Where the money would go

Donations are paid to The Giving Fountain, Inc. through Stripe. The donor’s tax receipt comes from The Giving Fountain, not from the charity. Stripe Connect appears in the site’s configuration, but its pilot list of nonprofits is empty, so no organization is paid directly by the processor.

For an organization that never claimed its listing, the money is held by GivingFountain and then, “typically monthly,” sent by electronic transfer or mailed check to “the address we have on record” — which, for an organization that has never interacted with the platform, is its IRS address. Nonprofits move. The IRS file lags.

The Terms are silent on what happens if that check is returned or never cashed. There is no stated waiting period, no stated reassignment process, and no stated policy on whether the 8% is retained when the payment never lands. Removal does not affect the money: the removal page states that funds from donations already made “are yours either way, and are sent to the address we have on record for your organization.”

The Giving Fountain, Inc. received its IRS ruling in June 2026 and has not yet filed a Form 990, so there is no public financial statement covering the funds it holds.

Not in California’s charity registry

California requires a charity soliciting donations in the state to register with the Attorney General’s Registry of Charities and Fundraisers. GivingFountain’s directory includes 183,285 California organizations and will accept a donation for any of them.

Searching the Registry on September 17, 2026, neither “Giving Fountain” nor its FEIN, 41-3218258, returned a record. A control search run in the same session for a charity known to be registered — the Sierra Club Foundation — returned its row with a status of “Listed,” confirming the search tool was working.

A pending application that has not yet been processed would not appear in the public search, and the organization is only a few months past its IRS determination. Registration status in other states has not been checked.

Is Giving Fountain At All Transparent?

Two things are worth stating plainly, because they separate this (somewhat) from the crypto shadow pages we have covered before.

First, the disclosure is on the page. Every unclaimed listing carries a line reading “This listing was compiled from public IRS records of tax-exempt organizations. [Organization] has not claimed it,” followed by a Request removal link. The removal form is plain-language, promises human review “usually within two business days,” and states that the platform may ask for confirmation that the requester can speak for the organization. This has not always been the case with platforms.

Second, the fees are published, with an example, before a donor gives.

And the harm here is so far prospective: the campaigns page reports no money raised, and the two organizations we checked in detail showed nothing collected in their names. This is a platform at the beginning, not a platform with a backlog of undelivered funds. Additionally, the SEO value of the site is likely fairly minimal, so the risk of a donor finding these pages in the wild is low. That said, in the world of AI sites, we will see more and more of these platforms emerge; our job must including pressing these platforms to increase the standards of transparency, accountability, and adherence to norms such as the Council of Nonprofits Principles for Ethical Fundraising Platforms.

This will happen again

Nonprofits should not be expected to opt-out of every platform that creates a shadow donation page. Whole Whale, the company behind this site have begun an opensource project around the Verified Giving Protocol that can be found at: VerifiedGiving.AI

The simple (not easy) goal is to help nonprofits create their own AI readable instructions for how and where different types of donations should be made to their organizations. Giving permission to the nonprofit to control this giving and information pathway.

Nonprofit News Feed sent GivingFountain a detailed list of questions about its listings, fee structure, handling of funds for unclaimed organizations, and state charitable registration. This piece will be updated with any response.

For the full comparison of platforms that build donation pages for nonprofits that never signed up, see our Shadow Donation Directory. Related coverage: The Billion-Dollar Middleman: What PayPal Giving Fund’s Growth Means for Nonprofits and Who Profits From a Pump.fun Charity Coin? The Fees Tell the Story.

Contact LetsTalk@wholewhale.com with any requests for documented evidence of this event.