Why Your Nonprofit Is Overpaying for Background Checks (And What the Industry Doesn't Want You to Know)

Let's start with a number the background screening industry doesn't put on their homepage.

In a 2017 Urban Institute study analyzing 1.7 million employment background checks, roughly 94% returned no criminal finding whatsoever. A separate University of Georgia study published the same year in the journal Demography found that approximately 92% of U.S. adults have no felony conviction on record. The volunteer population — people who choose to give their time to nonprofits, churches, and community organizations — skews even cleaner than those averages.

The vast majority of people who want to volunteer at your organization are exactly who they say they are.

And yet, background check companies charge nonprofits anywhere from $25 to $80 per report. Some bundle services you don't need. Others tack on monthly platform fees just to access the dashboard where you see those results. A few charge separately for the address history check, the criminal check, and the sex offender search — as if they were doing three completely separate things instead of one query against the same database.

The Over-Screening Problem

It's the same dynamic that plays out in medicine. Order more tests, bill for more procedures, collect more fees. The patient — or in this case, the nonprofit — rarely questions it because the framing is always "thoroughness." Who wants to be the organization that cut corners on volunteer screening?

Nobody. And the industry knows it.

The result is a market where nonprofits, churches, and volunteer organizations spend far more than they need to on screening — resources that could go toward their actual mission. A food bank running 200 volunteer checks per year at $40 each is spending $8,000 annually. On background checks. Most of which come back clean.

What a Check Actually Costs to Run

Here's what happens when you submit a background check: the screening company sends a query to a database aggregator — in our case, DataDivers Technologies — which searches court records, sex offender registries, federal watchlists, and other sources. That search has a cost. It's not $40. It's not even close to $40.

The markup is where providers make their money. The data cost is small. The platform fee, the per-report fee, the monthly subscription — that's margin, not necessity.

We built VolunteerBadge to strip that away. Our national criminal check costs $4.95. That includes county courts, state records, federal courts, sex offender registries across all 50 states, FBI Most Wanted, and OFAC sanctions — searched through 650 million court records via DataDivers. It's not a partial check. It's the full picture, at a price the industry told you wasn't possible.

The Things You Should Be Getting for Free

The address history check is one of the most useful tools in volunteer screening. When someone applies, they fill out a form with their address history. We run that against what we actually find in the data. Gaps and inconsistencies get flagged immediately. This step alone catches problems before you spend money on a criminal check.

Most platforms charge for this. We don't. It's included in every volunteer application, always free, no credits used.

Adverse action notices — the legally required documents you have to send when you deny someone a position based on a background check — are also something providers charge for, or at least don't help you with. Get the process wrong and you're exposed under FCRA. We generate those notices for you, pre-filled, compliant, ready to send. Also included.

What to Do About It

Audit what you're currently spending. Total up your last 12 months of background check costs — per-check fees, monthly platform costs, add-ons. Divide by the number of checks you ran. That's your real per-check cost.

Then compare it to $4.95.

The math tends to make people angry. It should. Not because the anger changes anything about the past, but because it clarifies what you should be doing going forward.

Your mission is serving your community. Every dollar you save on overhead is a dollar that goes back to that mission. Volunteer screening is non-negotiable — you should absolutely be doing it. Overpaying for it is the part that's optional.

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Sources

• Urban Institute (2017). Criminal Background Checks: Impact on Employment and Recidivism. Analysis of 1.7 million background checks found ~94% returned no criminal finding. urban.org
• Shannon et al. (2017). "The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010." Demography. Found approximately 8% of U.S. adults have a felony conviction. University of Georgia press release: news.uga.edu
• Sterling Volunteers & VolunteerMatch (2020). Volunteer Background Checks Industry Insights Report. When records were found in volunteer screening, 79% involved nonviolent misdemeanors. sterlingvolunteers.com