Givelink case study
Turning generosity into something you can see: how Givelink builds donor trust with Charity Navigator
Givelink was born from a simple question: once you give, what happens next? Founder Panos Kokmotos wanted donors to be able to see the answer. Givelink lets donors browse the real-time needs of local nonprofits — backpacks for a back-to-school drive, winter coats, pet food for an animal shelter — and buy exactly what's needed through a donation cart. From there, donors can track their gift step by step, right down to photos and videos of it reaching the people it helped.
"We try to make giving more visible, more tangible, more human," Kokmotos said, "where every donation can be tracked and shown back to donors, personalized to show them what exactly they changed out there in the world."
Trust in every donation
For Kokmotos, tangible giving only works if it's trustworthy giving. That's where Charity Navigator comes in.
Givelink integrates Charity Navigator ratings directly into each nonprofit's profile, so donors can see a nonprofit's rating right alongside its wish list. It's a detail that pays off twice: donors get an independent signal of legitimacy before they give, and nonprofits get a reason to strengthen their transparency.
"Donors understand if it's verified, if it's legitimate, if it has been vetted," Kokmotos said. "And for nonprofits, if they have a lower rating, they're incentivized to try to get a better one, so they can unlock more donations. It's a win-win for everyone."
Kokmotos also uses Charity Navigator data as an internal checkpoint, cross-referencing ratings alongside sources like ProPublica and IRS filings whenever a new nonprofit applies to join the platform.
Built on the API
Givelink has been pulling Charity Navigator ratings through the API since spring 2026, making it one of the earliest partners in the program. The integration surfaces ratings in two places at once. First, directly on each nonprofit's public profile, right alongside its wish list. Second, inside Givelink's own vetting workflow, where the team cross-checks a new nonprofit's rating against sources like ProPublica and IRS filings before approving it to join the platform.
That dual use is part of what makes the API valuable to a lean team, Kokmotos said. Rather than building and maintaining a separate verification system, Givelink pulls trusted, independent data once and puts it to work for both donor-facing transparency and internal nonprofit vetting.
The impact
Since integrating Charity Navigator ratings, Kokmotos has seen a clear pattern: nonprofits with stronger ratings attract more giving.
"The more transparent a nonprofit is, the more conversion they see on their profile, and the more donations they go on to receive," he said.
Nonprofits on the platform have raised no concerns about having their ratings visible to donors, even when that rating is modest — a sign, Kokmotos said, that transparency builds goodwill rather than eroding it.
What's next
As Givelink grows, Kokmotos sees the API playing an even bigger role in how donors discover and trust nonprofits. The team is exploring ways to let donors sort or filter nonprofits by rating, and is developing an AI-powered recommendation feature that will pull rating data in to surface highly rated nonprofits matching a donor's interests and location.
"It's about trust in the ecosystem," Kokmotos said. "A lot of people, when they're evaluating a nonprofit, would go to Charity Navigator separately to cross-verify. Having that data built in eliminates that extra step and adds your credibility to us from the start."
Kokmotos also pointed to nonprofit-facing guidance as an area of opportunity: clearer detail on what drives a rating, and what a nonprofit can do to improve it, would let Givelink pass that guidance directly to its nonprofit partners through the same integration.
Why it matters
For Givelink, the API isn't just a data pipeline. It's what makes tangible, trackable giving feel safe. As Kokmotos put it, the goal is to give donors a better sense of the market and the confidence that the nonprofit they're supporting is exactly who it says it is.