2 Research Projects Aim to Provide Detailed Picture of Non-Profit Organizations

Researchers are conducting countless studies, both big and small, around the nation and world to chart the dimensions of non-profit activity and its effects on public policy and social welfare. Two of the hottest projects promise to yield important new information about the breadth and impact of charitable, philanthropic, and volunteer work:

The Johns Hopkins University, in collaboration with scholars from around the world, has raised $5-million toward a $7-million project to measure non-profit activity in 27 nations.

The Urban Institute is about to start an analysis of the informational tax returns of some 200,000 non-profit organizations to develop a profile of the finances and activities of charitable and philanthropic groups nationwide. The project will cost $600,000 in the first two years; it is projected to continue for an additional three years after that.

The Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project has been under way since 1990, and its first results were released in 1994. The project began with an empirical study of non-profit activity in eight developed countries and general reports on activity in five developing nations. Seven of those countries now are part of the project’s 27-nation second phase, which began in 1996.

The project is designed to document the size, scope, structure, and finances of non-profit activity in nations as diverse as Poland, Venezuela, Japan, the United States, and South Africa. It also is examining the legal and historical background of the countries’ non-profit organizations and looking at what they do to solve social problems.

“We want to put the non-profit sector on the economic map of the world,” says project director Lester M. Salamon, a professor of policy studies at Johns Hopkins and director of its Center for Civil Society Studies.

Non-profit activity has largely been overlooked in global economic statistics and in policy-making circles, he says. As a result, “it is invisible to many citizens,” Mr. Salamon adds.

The project involves nearly 500 people, including an estimated 150 researchers, and has financial support from more than 35 sources, including foundations and government agencies in the United States and around the world. Among the U.S. grant-making institutions are the Ford, W. K. Kellogg, and Charles Stewart Mott Foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

The project’s first phase yielded a series of monographs and books called the Johns Hopkins Nonprofit Sector Series published by Manchester University Press, and the International Guide to Nonprofit Law published by John Wiley & Sons. During the second phase, researchers expect to issue statistical reports on each country, plus profiles of the legal environment for non-profit organizations in the various nations. The profiles will be incorporated into a second edition of the legal guide.

Information on the project, such as a general overview of its objectives, the titles of publications produced, and names of staff members, is available on the Johns Hopkins World-Wide Web site at http://www.jhu.edu/~ips/CNP.

The Urban Institute’s plan to analyze American non-profit groups will provide more up-to-date and comprehensive information on non-profit activities and finances than has ever been collected previously, says Elizabeth T. Boris, director of the think tank’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.

“We’re going to be revolutionizing the data,” Ms. Boris says.

The Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics has arranged for the Internal Revenue Service to electronically scan all the informational tax returns filed by non-profit organizations. (All groups with income of $25,000 or more must submit the Form 990 to the service each year.) Philanthropic Research, a non-profit group in Williamsburg, Va., will then put the information into digital form so that it can be analyzed.

Ms. Boris says the data will allow researchers to study the finances, staffing, and sources of support of non-profit organizations and build year-to-year comparisons that will be useful in monitoring trends.

The raw data will be far timelier than anything now available to researchers, who often must wait two to three years before getting their first glimpse of I.R.S. data. Currently, the Urban Institute offers limited 1992 data on about 185,000 non-profit organizations on its World-Wide Web site (http://www.urban.org).

Ms. Boris expects the first batch of 990 forms — about 15,000 of them — to be available from the I.R.S. next spring.

The Urban Institute is paying for the project with grants from donors who asked to remain anonymous.