Idealist.org Jobs, Volunteering & Nonprofit Scraper

Scrapes Idealist.org, the leading nonprofit/social-impact jobs and volunteering platform — paid jobs, volunteer opportunities, and the organization/nonprofit directory, all from the site's own public search index. No login, no API key.

Contents

• Key features
• Strengths and limits
• Output
• Input
• Input examples
• Incremental (delta) mode
• How to scrape Idealist.org
• FAQ

🔑 Key features

• Three entity types, one actor. jobs covers paid nonprofit-sector postings, volunteerOpportunities covers Idealist's (much larger) volunteering board, and organizations covers the nonprofit/org directory itself — mission, focus areas, location, whether it's currently hiring or seeking volunteers.
• No login, no private endpoint. Idealist's own search runs through a public, read-only search index; this actor queries that directly instead of scraping rendered HTML pages.
• Delta mode built in. Every run classifies each result as new, changed, unchanged, or delisted against a persisted baseline, so a scheduled re-run only bills for what actually changed.

⚖️ Strengths and limits

Read this before you run a big job, so you know exactly what you get.

Strengths

• Three datasets from one actor: paid nonprofit jobs, volunteer opportunities and the organization directory.
• Salary and location fields as structured data where Idealist has them, plus the listing description.
• Fast and light. Idealist's own search index, no login, no proxy; a default run takes about 5 seconds.

Limits

• Big selections need your go-ahead. A selection of up to 5,000 results comes back complete, which covers all paid jobs (about 2,500). Volunteer opportunities (about 108,000, about $540 at $5 per 1,000 on the free plan) and organizations (about 235,000, about $1,175) are much bigger, so a run stops at the newest 1,000 and says so, unless you set Max results to 5,000 or less or turn on fullExport. Set a spending limit for a full export.
• We haven't run a whole big data type end to end. Our tests stopped at about 18,000 rows (our own spending cap) at about 500 rows per second. A date-by-date count matched the totals above, and every sampled date range came back exact.
• Result counts are rough on big selections. Idealist's search can be far off in either direction (it reported about 286,000 volunteer opportunities and 43,000 organizations), so the count in the log is only a rough figure.
• Incremental mode needs a complete run. change_type and delistings only work for a selection the run covers completely: all jobs, or a big data type with fullExport. A run stopped at the newest 1,000 doesn't update the memory.
• Mostly the US. About 94% of jobs and most volunteer opportunities are in the US. Idealist also has far fewer paid jobs than volunteer listings.
• Salary isn't always there. has_salary: false when Idealist doesn't have it.
• Keyword only. There are no input filters for location, focus area or job type; filter the output yourself.
• It depends on Idealist's search index. If Idealist changes it, the actor stops working until it's updated. Not affiliated with Idealist.

📋 Output

One dataset item per job, volunteer opportunity, or organization (see the Output tab for the full field list) plus a change_type field.

Example — job:

{
  "source": "idealist",
  "external_id": "0584eb9326e540349dab0c670ca1ce17",
  "entity_type": "jobs",
  "url": "https://www.idealist.org/en/job/...",
  "name": "Program Manager",
  "org_name": "Smith Community Health",
  "org_type": "NONPROFIT",
  "city": "Georgetown",
  "state": "TX",
  "country": "US",
  "location_type": "ONSITE",
  "remote_ok": false,
  "areas_of_focus": ["HEALTH_MEDICINE"],
  "job_type": ["FULL_TIME"],
  "has_salary": true,
  "salary_minimum": 48000.0,
  "salary_maximum": 55000.0,
  "salary_period": "YEAR",
  "salary_currency": "USD",
  "published_at": "2026-09-01T00:00:00+00:00",
  "change_type": "new"
}

Example — organization:

{
  "source": "idealist",
  "external_id": "org-4821",
  "entity_type": "organizations",
  "name": "Smith Community Health",
  "org_type": "NONPROFIT",
  "mission": "Providing free clinical care to underserved families.",
  "city": "Georgetown",
  "state": "TX",
  "country": "US",
  "areas_of_focus": ["HEALTH_MEDICINE"],
  "hiring": true,
  "seeking_volunteers": true,
  "change_type": "new"
}

Known gaps:

• Not every job posting has salary data — has_salary: false when Idealist itself doesn't have it, rather than guessing.
• latitude/longitude are only present when the listing has a specific physical location; a fully remote posting leaves them null.

⚙️ Input

Key parameters (the Input tab lists every option):

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
entityType	String	jobs	jobs, volunteerOpportunities, or organizations.
query	String	(empty)	Optional free-text keyword search (e.g. "nurse", "climate"). Empty = the whole data type.
maxItems	Integer	50	Stop after pushing this many items. Clear it (null) for everything; see fullExport.
maxPages	Integer	(unlimited)	Cap on result pages walked, if you want a partial sample.
fullExport	Boolean	false	Needed for an uncapped run of more than 5,000 results. Billed per row, so this can cost $500–$1,200. Without it, such a run returns the newest 1,000.
mode	String	auto	auto/full/incremental — see Incremental mode.
impersonate	String	chrome	curl_cffi TLS-impersonation target.
proxyConfiguration	Object	off	Apify Proxy config. Off by default — clean without one in testing.

🧪 Input examples

Quick preview — default 50-item cap on job postings:

{
  "entityType": "jobs"
}

Volunteer opportunities for a keyword:

{
  "entityType": "volunteerOpportunities",
  "query": "climate",
  "maxItems": null
}

The whole organization directory (about 235,000 rows, about $1,175), scheduled tracking run:

{
  "entityType": "organizations",
  "mode": "incremental",
  "fullExport": true,
  "maxItems": null
}

🔄 Incremental (delta) mode

Every run classifies each result as new, changed, unchanged, or delisted, against a baseline persisted per entityType.

• mode: auto (default) — with maxItems cleared, the first run pushes everything (full); later runs push only new/changed/delisted. A capped run is a preview and always returns rows.
• A query-filtered, capped or page-capped run doesn't cover the full scope, so it never updates the baseline or reports delistings. Neither does a run stopped at the newest 1,000.

🚀 How to scrape Idealist.org

1. Open the actor in Apify Console and go to the Input tab.
2. Pick an entityType — jobs, volunteerOpportunities, or organizations.
3. maxItems defaults to 50 (a quick preview) — clear it for everything (big data types also need fullExport).
4. Click Start.
5. Browse results in the Output tab, or download as JSON/CSV/Excel, or pull them via the API.

❓ FAQ

Is it legal to scrape Idealist.org? It's legal to collect publicly available job, volunteering, and organization listing data. Results may contain limited personal/organizational contact information; scrape it only with a legitimate purpose under GDPR.

What's the difference between jobs and volunteerOpportunities? Idealist's own platform distinguishes paid positions from volunteer roles — this actor keeps that distinction rather than merging them into one undifferentiated feed.

Does this need a login or API key? No — Idealist's own search index is publicly reachable.

Feedback and reviews

Missing a field or hit a problem? Open an issue on the Issues tab: issues are answered promptly.

If this Actor is useful to you, please leave a short review on this page. Reviews help other people find it and help decide what to improve next. Thank you!

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Search keywords

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