Colorado Charity Registry - Nonprofit Filings & Financials

Colorado publishes its charitable-solicitation register as open data - the state's own file of every charity, paid solicitor and professional fundraising consultant registered to solicit in Colorado, together with their annual financial filings. This actor turns that register into a charged-per-record lookup, filter and aggregate tool: pull an organization's whole record, filter charities by name, county, status or size, read the financial statement behind a filing, or aggregate the register.

Built for: funders and grant-makers doing due diligence, nonprofit researchers and journalists, and anyone screening a charity's finances who wants the financial history and the people behind it in one query instead of reading PDFs one year at a time.

What it covers

272,689 filings across 29,604 organizations - a multi-year history, not a count of charities (one organization holds up to 36 annual filings). Four linked tables, all keyed by entity id:

• 272,689 financial filings - registration plus the annual report, with a full 990-style financial statement on each
• 3,413,247 associated persons - the officers, directors and contacts behind the filings
• 261,177 stated charitable purposes
• 3,203,830 other-state registrations - where else the charity is authorized to solicit

Depth beyond a bare registry:

• the revenue split - contributions, government, program services, investments, special events, sales - and the expense split - program services, administrative, fundraising, affiliates - plus year-end assets and liabilities, the program-service ratio and the previous year's totals on the same filing
• the IRS exempt status and code, the registration status (GOOD 194,094 / NOTICE 3 51,521 / WITHDRAWN 23,430 / EXEMPT / REVOKED / ...) and its date
• the authorized officer and CFO who signed the report, the NTEE codes, the principal and mailing address with county, and the registration / renewal / expiration dates

The fine print that matters

Read the grain before quoting a number: the 272,689 figure is filings, and there are only 29,604 organizations behind them - this is a filing history per charity, which is exactly what makes it useful. mode=entity returns one organization's whole record in a single query: its filing history, its associated persons, its stated purpose and the other states it solicits in.

Two quirks are handled for you. Socrata omits null columns, so every record carries the full key set with empty fill across every table and mode - a downstream schema never shifts. And the reporting-period columns (reportingperiodbegin / reportingperiodend) hold only a month and day ("12-31"), never a year - they are passed through verbatim and never parsed into a fake date.

Typical questions

• "One charity's whole record - every filing, officer, purpose and other-state registration."
• "Charities in Denver County over $1M in revenue."
• "Who sits on the board of a given nonprofit."
• "Which charities are on NOTICE 3 (delinquent) status."
• "Aggregate the register by county, registrant type or status."

Inputs

Input	What it does
mode	filings (default) / officers / purposes / otherStates / entity / aggregate
name / fein / entityId / documentId	identify the organization
registrantType / filingType / status / taxExemptStatus	what kind of registrant, filing or standing
county / city	where (principal address)
state	other state it solicits in (mode=otherStates)
revenueMin/Max / expensesMin/Max	financial ranges
approvedFrom/To / signedFrom/To	filing-approval and officer-signature dates
corpus / groupBy	aggregate table and dimension
maxResults	cap records (default 200)

Default run = the 200 most recently approved filings - fast for the daily auto-test. For one organization use entity; for a broad view use aggregate.

Low cost

From $0.0001 per record - billed only for the rows you use, at the platform floor. Cost scales with what you pull, not with the size of the register, and because each record is metered individually there's no per-run charge cap to hit on a big pull.

What a thin scraper misses is the join across four tables: the financial statement, the people who signed it, the stated purpose and the other-state registrations all hang off one entity id, and the register holds a filing history (up to 25 years of annual filings - as many as 36 filings for one organization) rather than a single snapshot. The financials are also filed as strings over the wire even though they are numbers - a text-ordered revenue column sorts $9 above $1,000,000 - and the reporting period is a month-and-day with no year. Normalizing the four-table join, the string-numbers and the yearless periods into a schema where a county / revenueMin / status query returns exactly the charity you mean is the actual product. Every pull is integrity-checked against the register's known shape, so a degraded source fails loudly instead of returning bad rows.

Source

• Colorado: Registration of Charities & Paid Solicitors - the state's charitable-solicitation register with annual financial filings. Public open data. Records are the state's own published fields; not an endorsement of any organization, and not tax advice.