cabennett85/gittest — Issue #721: NPO Data: collect as much NPO data as possible from various online sources
Author: cabennett85
Created: 2012-03-02 00:11:27+00:00
State: open

Collect as much publicly available NPO data as possible and clean up the data so that it can be used if we want to auto-generate pages. Storing them as JSON or XML would be ideal.

1. Official list of NPOs

Publication 78, Cumulative List of Organizations described in Section 170(c) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, is a list of organizations eligible to receive tax-deductible charitable contributions. This online version is offered to help you conduct a more efficient search of these organizations.
http://www.irs.gov/charities/article/0,,id=96136,00.html

I uploaded the compressed file to dropbox in the broadcause folder (please don't extract to your own local desktop and not in dropbox since the uncompressed file is 124 MB). There are currently about 882,000 NPOs listed there, with name, city, and state information.

2. Getting twitter pages for NPOs.

Doing some searching, I found this: http://twitter.com/#!/nonprofitorgs/following
The twitter account @nonprofitorgs is dedicated to be a portal to all npos on twitter by only following nonprofits and nonprofit staff. If you look at who they are following we can get a list of all NPOs on twitter and their twitter accounts. I pulled all the twitter user ids that nonprofitorgs is following. I just did it manually by hitting the URL. It's in dropbox/BC/engineering resources/

There are also some hand-made lists of NPOs and their twitter accounts on listorious:
http://listorious.com/Jason_Pollock/nonprofit-orgs
http://listorious.com/tags/nonprofit

3. Other info:

NGOs listed here on Duke University's website (http://library.duke.edu/research/subject/guides/ngo_guide/ngo_links/a-e.html)

Doing a quick search shows that Freebase also has logos, founders, sector, date founded, and description for 91 NPOs.
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/non-profit_organization/-/organization/organization_type/organizations_of_this_type

We can probably dig more too and also use DBPedia (http://wiki.dbpedia.org) as well.