Wouldn’t it be great to be able to track the establishment of new organizations with 501c3 status?
Don’t you think it would be empowering to be able to see trends in subsectors and areas of focus?
Could your organization benefit from a broad view of the entire nonprofit landscape and filter in whatever parameters are important to your research?
Recently we were searching for statistics on newly established non-profits sorted according to date, and although there exists a lot of data out there on the non-profit world, we could find the exact parameters were looking for. Even if it does exist out there it’s often very difficult to dig up. For example, try registering for the National Center for Charitable Statistics website to access this data if you don’t believe me. In another example, Guidestar wants you to put up the Benjamins to access their reports, as much as $1500 annually for their analyst reports. If it’s public information, we shouldn’t have to pay to access this data.
This is where Data.gov comes back in. Because there’s nothing currently there, I sent in request to have non-profit datasets (preferably real-time data, thank you!!!!) published on data.gov, and if you are in the non-profit “business” you too should request to have raw, unmolested access to data regarding this industry.
Suggest dataset here: http://www.data.gov/suggestdataset
(image credit: stallio)