Everyone in compliance knows KYC, Know Your Customer. Most know KYB too, Know Your Business. Between banks, fintechs, and corporations, those two terms cover a lot of ground.

But nobody's had a name for this standard applied to nonprofits, until now. We're coining it: KYNP, Know Your Nonprofit.

And we're not doing it from the sidelines. Goodstack reached a new milestone of 7.5 million nonprofit verifications. Every one of those verifications was a moment where a company, a platform, or a donor needed to know something simple but hard to prove: is this organization real, eligible, and safe to work with? At 7.5 million verifications, we've learned what that question requires, and why it deserves its own name.

Good standing isn't the whole picture

The easy version of nonprofit verification is a yes or no. Does this organization legally exist and is it in good standing? That's necessary, but for a lot of the decisions our partners make, it's not enough.

A company donating to a nonprofit is taking on risk that an initial registration check may not cover. Before making a donation, corporate impact teams need deeper answers: where does the money actually go? Who's running the organization? Does the sanctions and watchlist picture look clean? These are different questions, which need a different process.

Nonprofits need their own standard

Most due diligence tooling was built for companies. Think, registries, ownership records and financial filings. Nonprofits don't map cleanly onto any of that, which is exactly why KYB has never been a good fit for them. Here’s why nonprofits need their own standard:

• Registration is fragmented. Nonprofit registries vary widely by country, and some offer very little public information. Registration is a starting point, not the full picture.

• Governance is different. Nonprofits don't have conventional ownership structures or Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO) filings, so understanding who's actually behind an organization means looking at its governance and leadership instead.

• Operations cross borders. Nonprofits often work in regions where reliable information is genuinely hard to access, which makes effective diligence harder to do well.

KYNP is what we built to handle this properly. Not a repurposed KYB tool with a nonprofit spin, but a standard that’s purpose-built to assess nonprofits globally, using the checks that actually apply to them.

Risk-based, not one-size-fits-all

Goodstack's KYNP standard isn't a single check. Every nonprofit goes through rigorous due diligence, calibrated to the risk in front of us. No case is waved through.

Initial due diligence confirms whether an organization legally exists and is who it says it is, with first-line screening against sanctions, adverse media, warnings and watchlists, and hate speech. Standard due diligence builds on that, with deeper screening, plus financial, country and regulatory signals reviewed by our risk and compliance specialists.

For the cases that need it, our enhanced due diligence goes further still. Our specialists move from review to investigation, digging into what an organization actually does on the ground, where its funding comes from, and who's behind it, well past what registries and public filings can tell you. It's the kind of review that's built for the cases where "the paperwork looks fine" isn't a good enough answer.

The scale behind that scrutiny

Getting this right at scale takes infrastructure built for scrutiny, not just speed. Our screening spans 240+ countries and territories, checking against 130+ international and national sanctions lists and 120+ law enforcement and financial crime watchlists, with adverse media monitoring across 11,000+ sources globally.

And it doesn't stop at approval. Every organization stays under risk-based monitoring and periodic review, because a nonprofit that was safe yesterday may not be tomorrow. Reputational risk, regulatory expectations, and sanctions exposure don't disappear because a check happened once. Sanctions rules can apply regardless of intent, and companies need risk-based controls that hold up, especially when funding crosses borders or touches higher-risk jurisdictions.

It's the same infrastructure behind verifications for companies like Google, Canva, and ElevenLabs, run at a depth most teams can't replicate in house.

Why this matters more than ever

Companies that want to do good shouldn't have to become experts in nonprofit compliance to do it safely. That's exactly what KYNP is built for.

It’s not just about catching problems, but being able to show your work. Every assessment we run ends in a clear, defensible decision backed by a complete audit trail, so our partners can evidence their due diligence to boards, auditors, regulators, and internal stakeholders whenever they're asked.

7.5 million verifications taught us something: nonprofit due diligence deserved better than borrowed language. KYNP is the name for what got us there, and what happens next. Nonprofit due diligence has needed a name, and a standard, for a long time. Goodstack is giving it both.

Want to see what KYNP looks like in practice? Reach out below for a sample assessment.