HNDS-I: Collaborative Research: Developing a Data Platform for Analysis of Nonprofit Organizations

American University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

Nonprofit organizations are important contributors to the US economy and social well-being. Across a wide range of domains, such as healthcare, childcare, education, job training, and many others, nonprofit organizations serve the public, reduce the costs of government, and improve daily lives. Millions of individuals interact with nonprofit organizations every day. Yet despite these important roles, the high costs of collecting and sharing data have prevented a greater understanding of nonprofit organizations and their collective contributions to society. This project, the Nonprofit Organization Research Panel Project (NORPP) Manager, will create a publicly-accessible, internet-based, and collaborative research platform that will lower the costs of collecting and sharing large amounts of high-quality, multiyear data on nonprofits and their impacts. The platform will strengthen research and evaluation, broaden access to data-intensive research, and lead to more scientifically informed decision-making by organizations, policymakers, and funders and to improved outcomes for the communities they serve. The NORPP platform will offer three primary functions. First, tools and automated processes will allow researchers to recruit and grow representative samples of nonprofit organizations nationally and across communities, states, and regions over time using a common methodology. The platform will automate systematic sampling and weighting procedures to ensure representativeness for studies using the platform, and it will reduce other costs to researchers by automating information flows with organizations in its samples. It will also allow public access among the research and practice communities to download nationally representative data, build additional project-specific samples within the platform, add original survey instruments, and collect original data. Second, the NORPP Manager will support the merger of data developed within the platform with IRS Form 990 Data and other available data on organizations from the population of 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations that file with the IRS, including geocoded data on organizations’ communities and external environment that are publicly available from Census and other sources. Third, the NORPP Manager will serve as a collaborative repository to manage a bank of core and supplemental questionnaires to facilitate replication studies, improve content validity of measurements, and allow for consistent measurement scales across nonprofit organizational research. This work will increase the efficiency of research on nonprofit organizations by significantly reducing the costs to sample, contact, and survey nonprofit organizations, and to merge those data with existing data with the goal of facilitating the growth of rigorous, data-intensive research across the many social science disciplines that intersect with nonprofit organizational research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.