A Guide to... Business Research (Ciocca Center)

Most nonprofits are required to publish their IRS form 990 returns, but they may not be required to publish any other financial reports or statements. However, in the interest of transparency, many large organizations do publish annual reports and independent audit reports of their finances. 

Often, the best way to find these documents is to search on the organization's websites. Sometimes, reports will be available under an "About Us" or "Publications" section. Other times, the reports can be buried and difficult to find. In these cases, it can be useful to do a Google search of the website alone to find the publications you're looking for.

First, you'll need the website's URL. For Greenpeace, that would be greenpeace.org.

To search within Greenpeace's website, go to Google.com and type "site:greenpeace.org" in the search box (without quotation marks). Then add the terms you want to search for. If I were looking for financial statements, I could just type that into the box without quotation marks:

Press Enter or click "Google Search." Any page that contains financial statements should come up in the list.

If this search doesn't yield any results, try using synonyms ("annual report," "finance," "financial," etc.). If you're really having trouble, contact a librarian for help.