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

非营利组织是美国经济和社会福祉的重要贡献者。非营利组织在医疗保健、儿童保育、教育、职业培训等广泛领域为公众服务，降低政府成本，改善日常生活。每天都有数以百万计的个人与非营利组织互动。然而，尽管发挥了这些重要作用，但收集和共享数据的高昂成本阻碍了人们更好地了解非营利组织及其对社会的集体贡献。该项目名为非营利组织研究小组项目(NORPP)经理，将创建一个可公开访问的、基于互联网的协作研究平台，以降低收集和共享大量关于非营利组织及其影响的高质量、多年数据的成本。该平台将加强研究和评估，扩大对数据密集型研究的获取，使组织、政策制定者和资助者做出更科学的决策，并改善他们所服务的社区的成果。NORPP平台将提供三个主要功能。首先，工具和自动化流程将允许研究人员使用共同的方法在全国范围内以及跨社区、州和地区招募和培养具有代表性的非营利组织样本。该平台将自动化系统抽样和加权程序，以确保使用该平台的研究的代表性，并将通过自动化与其样本中的组织的信息流来降低研究人员的其他成本。它还将允许研究和实践界的公众访问，以下载具有全国代表性的数据，在平台内建立更多针对特定项目的样本，添加原始调查工具，并收集原始数据。其次，NORPP管理人员将支持将平台内开发的数据与IRS Form 990数据和其他可用数据合并，这些数据来自501(C)(3)向IRS提交文件的非营利组织，包括从人口普查和其他来源公开获得的关于组织社区和外部环境的地理编码数据。第三，NORPP管理器将作为协作库，管理核心和补充问卷库，以促进复制研究，提高测量的内容有效性，并允许在非营利性组织研究中使用一致的测量尺度。这项工作将显著降低抽样、联系和调查非营利组织的成本，并将这些数据与现有数据合并，以促进与非营利组织研究交叉的许多社会科学学科的严谨、数据密集型研究的发展，从而提高对非营利组织的研究效率。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.