IRS tax-exempt records
Your EIN, legal name and state matched against the IRS Business Master File and Publication 78 list. This covers most 501(c)(3) rescues, including very small ones that file a 990-N postcard.
AutomaticVerification
Prove you’re a shelter in about two minutes, without talking to anyone.
Free software attracts people who are not running a shelter. Checking that you are should not cost you a phone call, a scanned letter, or three days of waiting — especially if you are four people and a garage full of kittens.
How it works
You create the account yourself. We check what you tell us against public records automatically. Most organizations are verified before they finish reading the welcome screen.
01
Create your account
Your name, your work email, your organization’s legal name, state, and its EIN or state registration number. No card, no sales form, no “request a demo”.
02
Confirm your email
A normal confirmation link. It also tells us the address is real, which stops most of the automated signups on its own.
03
We check the public record
Against the IRS list of tax-exempt organizations, state charity and kennel registries, the adoption listing sites, and Shelter Animals Count membership. Any one clean match verifies you. This takes seconds and you do not do anything.
04
Start entering animals
Verified or not, you can use Rescuely immediately. Verification is not a gate in front of the work — it gates the things that reach the public.
What we check against.
Any single one of these verifies an organization. Most shelters match two or three.
A government email domain
A municipal or county shelter signing up from a .gov or state .us address is verified on that alone. City animal control does not need to prove it is a nonprofit, because it is not one.
Adoption listing sites
An organization already listed on Petfinder, Adopt-a-Pet or RescueGroups has been checked by them. We match on name, city and state and accept that as evidence.
AutomaticShelter Animals Count membership
If you already report to SAC, your organization id verifies you and we keep it on the record for your monthly export.
AutomaticState registration and kennel licenses
State charity registration and, where the state publishes them, animal shelter or kennel license numbers. Coverage varies by state because the states vary.
Automatic where publishedControl of your own domain
If your rescue has a website, one DNS record proves it is yours. Combined with any weaker signal, that is enough.
AutomaticA document, if none of that fits
Upload your determination letter, state registration or kennel license. We read the name and number off it and match them; a person only looks if the automatic check disagrees with itself.
FallbackIf nothing matches yet.
Brand new rescues exist. A group that incorporated last month is not in the IRS file yet and is not on Petfinder yet, and that is not a reason to lock them out.
You get everything that runs the shelter, immediately
Animals, care log, medical, foster, adoption, reporting, your data. All of it free, and all of it working from the minute you confirm your email.
Only the things that face the public
Publishing to the adoption listing feeds, sending bulk email from your shelter’s name, and taking card payments stay off until you are verified. Those are the things a bad actor would want, and none of them is the work.
A provisional account does not expire into nothing. If we still cannot verify you after thirty days, a person reads your file — and if you are real, you get verified. Nobody loses a record over paperwork.
Keeping the bots out
Without making you prove you are a person seven times.
- No puzzles
- An invisible challenge that almost nobody has to interact with. If you have ever had to identify a crosswalk to feed a dog, you know why.
- Confirmed email
- Double opt-in, with disposable and throwaway domains refused at the door.
- One organization per registration number
- An EIN that already has a shelter on it cannot be used to open a second one. If that is your organization, you get an invite to join it instead.
- Rate limits that fit reality
- Nobody legitimately registers eleven shelters from one address in an hour.
- Accessible by default
- The whole signup works from the keyboard and with a screen reader, because a verification wall that excludes disabled staff is not a security feature.
Your shelter can be running this by the end of the day.
Create your account, verify your organization, and start entering animals. No sales call, no quote, no card. The part of Rescuely that runs a shelter is free and stays free.