Test Site Launched to Make State Charity Registration Easier. Michael Towner, Iconic Legacy

​A test website for the Single Portal Initiative — a central electronic system that would allow charities to register in multiple states — went online Monday, announced state charity officials at a conference.
The new effort allows nonprofit officials to test the site and enroll their organizations to solicit donations in Connecticut and Georgia.
Charities should be able to register with more states by mid-February 2019 during a second testing phase, said Chad Canfield, operations manager for the charitable-trust section of the Office of the Attorney General of Michigan.
As more states join and charities provide their feedback, the site will be improved, he said. "What you see today or what you see tomorrow when you go back and look isn’t what the project is going to look like in six months or a year from now," Canfield said.
The idea for the Single Portal Initiative has been in the works for many years, Canfield noted. The goal of the project is to provide a central online registration system for charities and professional fundraisers to fill out for their annual registrations in multiple states.
The system would save charities time and money, officials say, because nonprofits would only have to enter in certain data and submit key documents — such as an informational tax form 990 — once. For many charities, the system would replace the bureaucratic labyrinth of completing applications — and often submitting the same documents — for multiple states.
The test website launched Monday allows only charities to register, not third-party fundraisers — a feature the project’s developers expect to add. Other features they hope will come later include an analytics tool that will help charity regulators detect fraud and negligence, said Joshua Goldstein, vice president for product at CityBase, which is part of the development team on the site for state officials.
State officials also want charity data to be automatically entered from the Forms 990 that organizations file with the Internal Revenue Service, he said.
Currently, the test site has separate fields to enter some of the same data for registration in both Connecticut and Georgia, Goldstein noted — though the goal is for charities to enter each piece of information only once to register with many states.
The bigger aim, he said, is for the registration process to become much faster. "If you’re a charity and you decide to register in a state, you should be able to complete that registration same day, if not same hour," he said, "and that’s our ambition."
​Michael Towner