NAIP: NORPP Analytics Integration Platform

The platform

The platform combines nonprofit records (IRS registrations and Form 990 filings via the NCCS Core Files) with county- and tract-level socioeconomic indicators from federal sources, and makes them queryable through this site's Metabase instance. Since 2025 it has used large language models with retrieval-augmented generation to reduce the manual effort of modeling and cleaning evolving datasets, such as the annual changes in Form 990 schemas.

In 2026 the project added agentic workflow scripts that compute correlations across datasets directly. Every number is produced by standard statistical software (SciPy, statsmodels); language models propose candidate relationships and explain results, but never compute them. Candidate findings pass multiple-comparison correction, permutation tests within state, state fixed-effects regression with cluster-robust errors, and an effect-size floor before they are reported.

Preliminary results

These results are preliminary and come from 2026 student research projects that use NAIP data. The linked repositories contain the code and data needed to check them.

Community need and recorded nonprofit resources

Each county's need score averages its poverty rate (2023), share of population with limited food access and housing cost relative to regional income. Its resource score averages registered nonprofits per 10,000 residents, revenue per resident and net assets per resident. Each indicator is compressed with a signed logarithm and standardized across counties; the map shows need minus resources.

The comparison covers 3,066 county areas in 48 states and DC, built from 3,420,024 organization records. Zapata and Zavala Counties, Texas, and Martin County, Kentucky, have the largest gaps. Florida and Connecticut are not mapped because their organization locations could not be matched to counties. Scores are relative positions, not dollars of unmet need.

Code and data: county table · scripts · provenance (commit 756ddda)

Community need and food-sector presence

Replacing general nonprofit resources with registered food-sector organizations changes which places stand out: Cameron Parish, Louisiana, has the largest gap, and the two maps share none of their ten highest-scoring counties, although their full rankings partly agree (rank correlation 0.585).

Financial resources, organizational presence and services delivered are distinct measures, so the choice of resource measure should match the social mission being studied.

Fundraising efficiency and local nonprofit presence

A study of large nonprofits (at least $500,000 in revenue; 117,510 annual records, 2018–2022) asked whether fundraising efficiency, contributions per dollar of direct fundraising costs, depends on the local environment. Under a zero-sum view of donations, more nearby social-service nonprofits would mean lower efficiency. The preliminary results show the opposite: efficiency is higher where social-service nonprofits are denser (β = +2.12, p = 0.002), after accounting for revenue, activity category, region, poverty and household income. Higher local housing costs and lower bank-branch density are also associated with lower and higher efficiency, respectively.

Code and reports: fundraising study repository (commit 24ce299)

Data sources

• NCCS Core Files and IRS Form 990 filings: Nonprofit finances (revenue, assets, fundraising expenses)
• IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File: Registered organizations, locations and activity categories (NTEE)
• U.S. Census American Community Survey (5-year): County poverty, income and population
• Disadvantaged-community tract layer (U.S. DOE): Limited food access (USDA Food Access Research Atlas 2019), housing cost (CNT H+T Index 2016)
• Zillow Home Value Index: Local housing cost (fundraising study)
• FDIC BankFind: Bank-branch locations (fundraising study)

Code repositories

Publications

• Calton Pu, Murali Krishna Madan Rao and Lewis Faulk. "Challenges and Opportunities in Research on Nonprofits: Measuring the Countable and Assessing the Noncountable." 2026. Manuscript under review.
• Calton Pu and Lewis Faulk. "Collaborative Research on Nonprofits: Broadening Knowledge with New Data Management." Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC 2025), Pittsburgh, PA.
• Calton Pu, Anmol Agarwal, Tianyu Chen and Lewis Faulk. "Information Integration in Social Science Research: Advances with LLMs in the NAIP Project." Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE Conference on Information Reuse and Integration (IRI 2025), San Jose, CA.
• Calton Pu, Mirae Kim, Teresa Derrick-Mills and Lewis Faulk. "Challenges and Experiences in Data Integration to Support Research on Nonprofit Organizations." ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, August 2025.
• Mirae Kim, Lewis Faulk, Teresa Derrick-Mills, Jesse Lecy, Calton Pu, Hannah Martin, Thiyaghessan Poongundranar, Alan Abramson, Elizabeth Boris and Laura Tomasko. "Nonprofit Trends Longitudinal Survey Public Use Data Files." 2024.