Before a foundation funds you, before a donor-advised fund releases a grant, before a careful donor writes a check, many of them look you up on Candid. It's the database (formed when GuideStar and Foundation Center merged) that holds profiles for roughly 1.9 million U.S. nonprofits, and it feeds your information to 200+ partners, including major donor-advised funds. If your profile is thin or unclaimed, you look like an unknown. If it's complete, you look like a safe bet.

Candid rewards completeness with a Seal of Transparency in four tiers, Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum. The more you fill in, the higher the Seal. Candid's own research found that organizations with a Seal receive, on average, about 62% more in donor contributions than those without one. The whole thing is free, and the basics take about as long as a coffee break.

Step 1: Claim your profile

Go to candid.org and register or log in. Search for your organization by name or EIN, a profile probably already exists, auto-built from your IRS filings. You'll verify that you're authorized to manage it (Candid confirms your connection to the organization). Once you're in, you control what the public sees.

A note before you start: the Seals are earned in order. You complete Bronze to unlock Silver, Silver to unlock Gold, and Gold to unlock Platinum. So work top to bottom, each level builds on the last, and Candid's interactive checklist shows you exactly which fields remain at each step.

Bronze: make sure donors can find you

Bronze is the "you exist and here's how to reach you" tier. It asks for the basics, all of which you already know off the top of your head:

Fill those in, click Publish, and you've earned a Bronze Seal. Genuinely, this is a 15-minute task.

Silver: tell funders what you actually do

Silver is where you make the case for support by describing your work. It adds:

Funders tend to support organizations whose programs and service areas align with their own priorities, so this section is doing real matchmaking work. In the 2026 profile, the Programs and People sections save automatically as you go, so you can build them up over a few sittings without losing anything.

Gold: open your books and your board

Gold is the trust tier, it's where serious funders start paying attention. It requires two things:

Here's the perk worth knowing: nonprofits with under $1 million in annual revenue or expenses get a free year of Candid Premium when they reach Gold. For a small organization, that's a meaningful bonus for work you'd want to do anyway.

Platinum: show your impact

Platinum is the top tier, and it's about results rather than activity. You share your goals and strategies and add at least one recent metric: a concrete number that shows what your programs achieved (people served, meals provided, graduation rate, whatever your work measures). Adding a current-year metric is what tips a Gold profile up to Platinum.

Don't overthink the metric. One honest, well-defined number beats a vague claim. Pick something you already track and can stand behind.

After you publish: put the Seal to work

Earning the Seal is only half the value, displaying it is the other half. Once you've published:

One last thing: Seals are dated by year (you'll see "2026 Seal"), so plan to log back in once a year to review your fields, refresh your numbers, and re-publish. Candid has made renewal a quick review-and-publish pass rather than a from-scratch effort.

One thing to do this week Claim or log into your Candid profile and finish the Bronze tier in one sitting. It's only mission, contact, population served, and your leadership, all things you already know, and it's the foundation everything else builds on. You can come back for Silver and Gold once your 990 and program write-ups are handy.

None of this requires money or a consultant, just an hour spread across a couple of sittings. A complete Candid profile is one of the highest-leverage free things a nonprofit can do to be found and trusted by the people who fund the work.