A research lab focused on improving the quality of nonprofit data available to social good organizations, researchers and the media, with a focus on nonprofit firmographics and operations, has been launched by GivingTuesday and Humanitas.

The Humanitas Research Hub is hosted within the GivingTuesday Data Commons platform, and can be accessed here: https://data.givingtuesday.org/humanitas

Humanitas is a Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of artificial intelligence-powered tools to social impact companies. GivingTuesday, in New York City, operates the worldwide annual event for social good. 

The Hub’s initial focus is expanding the Humanitas data set, which currently includes data such as description, nonprofit employee identification number (EIN) and geographical information from nearly 2 million nonprofits. The Hub will allow data owners, data product creators and others to contribute updated information about the nonprofits.

“This is more of a collaborative research effort than a kind of co-op database,” Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer at GivingTuesday told The NonProfit Times. “This Humanitas [data set] is not donation data. It is data about the nonprofit sector – where they are, what they do. None of our datasets include donor-identifiable data.”

Nonprofit data holders can join the Humanitas Research Hub by contributing their own data, and drawing on the aggregated data in support of their research or to achieve their social good goals. Interested parties can sign up here: https://bit.ly/3MbK2PL

The new effort is part of a suite of nonprofit research data hubs hosted by the Giving Tuesday Data Commons (https://bit.ly/3K8xeI3). The data enables researchers to recognize patterns of, for instance, new donor retention in the nonprofit sector, whether by cause area, by organization, by time of the year or any of a number of criteria. All of the donor data received by the organization is anonymized.

“There’s a growing understanding in the nonprofit social sector that we haven’t been counting all the ways people give,” Rosenbaum said. “If we want to maximize fundraising results for 501(c)(3) organizations, we need to understand the full spectrum of generosity.” Ideally, the new resources will capture all the ways people support nonprofits, giving agency to those whose contributions have historically been overlooked, Rosenbaum added.