ACNC Charity Search

Search the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC) public charity register by name, ABN, location, and the same filters available on the site — status, size, state and country of operation, beneficiaries, and charity subtype.

For each matching charity you can get either a quick summary row, or the full record: contact details, financials, beneficiaries, countries of operation, responsible persons (directors), and program/activity descriptions.

What it does

1. Builds the same search request the ACNC website sends when you use the filters on acnc.gov.au/charity/charities.
2. Pages through all matching results.
3. For each matching charity, optionally fetches its full public record (one extra request per charity — see Fetch full charity details below).
4. Saves one row per charity to the dataset, with a source URL and a UTC capture timestamp on every row.

This is a JSON-API-based scraper (no browser), so it's fast and doesn't require Playwright.

Input

All fields are optional — leave everything blank to fetch all registered charities (not recommended without also setting a reasonable Max results).

Field	Description
Charity name or ABN	Free-text search, same as the site's main search box.
Charity location	Free-text suburb or postcode search.
Status	Registered / Revoked / Voluntarily revoked.
Size	Small / Medium / Large.
State of operation	Australian state or territory.
Countries of operation	Country the charity operates in.
Who the charity helps	One or more beneficiary groups (multi-select), e.g. "Youth", "People with disabilities".
Charity subtype	The charity's registered purpose/subtype.
Fetch full charity details	On (default): fetches each charity's full record — contact info, financials, beneficiaries, countries, directors, and programs — at the cost of one extra request per result. Off: only the basic search-result fields (name, ABN, status, size, suburb, state) are returned, and the run finishes much faster.
Max results	Caps how many charity records are fetched. Default 5.

All filter dropdown values are generated directly from the ACNC site's own facet list (generate_schema.py + facets.json), so the available options always match what's genuinely selectable on the live site.

Output

One dataset row per charity. Exact fields depend on Fetch full charity details:

With details on (default): uuid, name, abn, status, size, address_line1, address_line2, suburb, state, postcode, country, website, email, phone, date_established, summary_of_activities, beneficiaries, countries_of_operation, responsible_persons, program_count, programs, total_income_donations, total_income_goods_services, total_income_govt_grants, total_income_investments, total_expenses_employee, total_expenses_other, last_reported, next_report_due, source_url, captured_at

With details off: uuid, name, abn, status, size, suburb, state, source_url, captured_at

source_url and captured_at are included on every row for traceability back to the exact request and moment the data was fetched.

Example use cases

• Building a list of registered charities in a given state for grant or partnership outreach.
• Monitoring a specific charity's financials and reporting status over time (re-run periodically).
• Research into which charities serve a particular beneficiary group or operate in a particular country.

Known limitations

• Pagination uses a page query parameter, confirmed against a real site request (0-indexed, matches the API's own pager.current_page). If the ACNC site changes this, the crawler detects that pagination stopped advancing and halts cleanly rather than looping.
• searchTerm/location map to the search/location query parameters, confirmed against a real request.
• This Actor depends on the structure of ACNC's public search and entity JSON API, which is not an officially documented/versioned API. If ACNC changes its site, this Actor may need updating.
• Respects the source site's own rate limits via conservative default concurrency (max_tasks_per_minute=120).