Nonprofit organizations
Ty Tuff, ESIIL Data Scientist 2023-05-21
Nonprofit Explorer API by ProPublica
The Nonprofit Explorer API by ProPublica offers an invaluable resource to anyone interested in exploring the extensive landscape of tax-exempt organizations in the United States. Launched by ProPublica, a renowned non-profit newsroom specializing in investigative journalism, this API provides extensive access to data collected from millions of tax filings sent to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api
The data accessible through the Nonprofit Explorer API encompasses information about each organization’s financial details, including revenues and expenses, mission statements, lists of officers, and more. This information, sourced from the IRS, has been carefully organized and made searchable, bringing a wealth of data to your fingertips.
A particularly significant feature of this API is its ability to search through the database using specific keywords. In the example we’re about to delve into, we’ll use the keyword “education”. This functionality opens up countless avenues for analysis, helping researchers, journalists, policy makers, and curious individuals alike to investigate patterns, identify trends, and uncover insightful details about the non-profit sector’s contribution to education.
Through this exploration, we aim to unlock a better understanding of the non-profit ecosystem, its role in our society, and particularly its impact on education. The insights we gain may serve as a foundation for future research, decision making, and strategy development for those working in or with the non-profit sector.
Education
The Nonprofit Explorer API by ProPublica provides data on tax-exempt organizations in the United States. In this example, we’ll search for organizations with the keyword “education” and analyze the results.
R: In R, we’ll use the ‘httr’ and ‘jsonlite’ packages to fetch and process data from the Nonprofit Explorer API.
R code:
# Install and load necessary libraries
library(httr)
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch data for organizations with the keyword "education"
url <- "https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/search.json?q=education"
response <- GET(url)
# Check if the request was successful
if (http_status(response)$category == "Success") {
data <- content(response, "parsed")
organizations <- data$organizations
# Count the number of organizations per state
state_counts <- table(sapply(organizations, function(x) x$state))
print(state_counts)
} else {
print(http_status(response)$message)
}
Python: In Python, we’ll use the ‘requests’ library to fetch data from the Nonprofit Explorer API and ‘pandas’ library to process the data.
Python code:
# Install necessary libraries
import requests
import pandas as pd
# Fetch data for organizations with the keyword "education"
url = "https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/api/v2/search.json?q=education"
response = requests.get(url)
# Check if the request was successful
if response.status_code == 200:
data = response.json()
organizations = data["organizations"]
# Count the number of organizations per state
state_counts = pd.DataFrame(organizations)["state"].value_counts()
print(state_counts)
else:
print(f"Error: {response.status_code}")
In conclusion, both R and Python offer efficient ways to fetch and process data from APIs like the Nonprofit Explorer API. The ‘httr’ and ‘jsonlite’ libraries in R provide a straightforward way to make HTTP requests and parse JSON data, while the ‘requests’ library in Python offers similar functionality. The ‘pandas’ library in Python can be used for data manipulation and analysis, and R provides built-in functions like table() for aggregating data. Depending on your preferred programming language and environment, both options can be effective for working with the Nonprofit Explorer API.