Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Registering Your Charity

The most critical registration task you can do is to complete the individual state registration process. If you collect donations from people outside your organization's home state, you must register with the other states. This procedure is part of the individual states' solicitation laws, and compliance isn't optional. A few exceptions exist because only 40 states now require charities to register individually. See www.irs.gov/charities to view the list of states. Each state differs in how it requires registration, so we can't give you details on how to do so. Try an online search using your state name and the search terms register, donations, and charity.

Fortunately, a collaborative effort was created to make filing a little less burdensome on nonprofits. The National Association of State Charities Officials, in cooperation with the National Association of Attorneys General, created a unified registration statement (URS) to make multistate registration simple. The organization provides a registration kit in PDF format, which you can download from its site at www.multistatefiling.org. After you complete the information, you can submit the form to multiple states to register your organization.

The unified registration statement kit isn't accepted by Colorado, Florida, or Oklahoma. If you use the URS kit, you aren't in compliance with these states and must ...