They manage more than $30 billion in assets and were responsible for more than $2 billion in charitable giving in 2000. More than 550 of them are located in the United States alone, representing both major metropolitan areas and rural neighborhoods. They're community foundations, and they play a key role in the nation's philanthropic process. But what exactly do they do?

GuideStar's Information Technology staff has been putting in long hours over the past few months. They have redesigned the infrastructure of the GuideStar database, increased system capacity, added a fail-over capability, upgraded GuideStar's search engine, and moved the entire GuideStar Web site from one Web hosting service to another.