Buy your .foundation domain today

A .foundation domain is used overwhelmingly by real charitable bodies. Live examples include a national health charity, a philanthropic foundation set up by a well-known entrepreneur and a foundation funding postgraduate scholarships, which is a more credible population than most new extensions can show.

Around the grantmakers sit community trusts, corporate giving arms and endowments attached to a family or a company. What unites them is that the money goes out rather than in, which is the distinction the word carries and the reason it reads differently from a fundraising or campaign extension.

No, the .foundation registry checks nothing and requires no charitable status. The agreement includes an open registration commitment stating that names will be open and available to lawful registrants and that the operator will not limit eligibility by identity, and there is no community specification attached.

That is a deliberate contrast with two other extensions the same registry runs rather than an oversight. The operator does apply genuine eligibility checks elsewhere in its portfolio, and it chose not to apply them here.

No, a .foundation domain carries no legal requirement, because the rules that control the word attach to a legal entity name rather than to a web address. Several countries do regulate the underlying legal form: German law, for instance, requires state recognition before a Stiftung comes into existence at all.

So the two questions are separate and only one of them involves a regulator. If you want to constitute a foundation as a legal entity, your own jurisdiction sets the terms. If you only want the word in your web address, nothing needs approval.

Yes, and both are common on the extension. A company foundation gets a clean separation between the commercial brand and the giving program, which is useful when the grantmaking has its own board, its own reporting and an audience that is not your customers.

A family trust or a private endowment gets the same benefit at smaller scale. Keep the address stable across years, because grant recipients, applicants and annual reports all cite it, and a foundation that changes its address makes its own history harder to follow.

Because .foundation asks nothing of you and .ngo does. Both are run by the same registry, and that registry requires .ngo registrants to certify that they meet a set of eligibility characteristics at the point of registration, backed by an audit program. .foundation has no equivalent.

Which you want depends on what you are buying. If you value a namespace where every holder has attested to being a genuine public-interest body, .ngo is the stricter neighborhood and worth the paperwork. If you want the word that describes a grantmaker, .foundation is the accurate one, and .org remains the address most donors will expect to see.

Mostly they do not, which is worth knowing because the word fits them so well. The large open-source foundations have kept their main sites on .org, and the most visible software-related name on this extension belongs to a front-end framework that happens to be called Foundation.

If you run an open-source foundation the extension is available and accurate, and you would be early rather than in company. Weigh that against the fact that developers looking for you will type .org first, because that is where every comparable body sits.

Yes, and for an established charity that is the lower-risk way in. Keep the .org as your main address, where donors and search engines already find you, and use a short .foundation name for a specific program, a grant round or a campaign that wants its own identity.

The other use is defensive. Registering the name that matches yours keeps it out of other hands for very little money, and pointing it at your existing site costs nothing more. Keep it on automatic renewal if you do, because a lapsed name that once resolved to a charity is an unattractive thing to lose.

No, and it is better to be straightforward about it. .org has decades of association with nonprofits and is what a donor, a journalist or a grant officer expects, while .foundation is a newer word-based extension that a reader has to think about for a moment.

What .foundation gives you in exchange is precision and availability. It says grantmaker rather than simply not-for-profit, and the name matching your own body is far likelier to be free. For a new organization with no established address, that trade is often worth making.