November 16, 2016 | Read Time: 2 minutes
International and foreign-affairs organizations in the Twin Cities are, on average, growing at the same rate as in much larger metropolitan areas like New York.
And arts organizations in Portland, Ore., grew faster, on average, than arts groups in any other U.S. cities over the past five years.
Those are just two of the revelations coming from a new tool, launched Wednesday by the Urban Institute, that tracks the rise or decline in support for various causes around the country.
The tool provides data on all sources of funding for every charity that filed a tax return from 1994 to 2014. Data can be filtered by 10 causes as well as more than 50 metropolitan areas, each state, and nationally.
The new tool’s release follows the think tank’s publication of the 2016 Nonprofit Almanac, which includes information about the nonprofit world in aggregate, highlighting data like the growth in the number of nonprofits and the total number of people they employ.
“We wanted to approach this from a slightly different perspective,” said Brice McKeever, a research associate for the Urban Institute’s Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy.
Nuanced Data
The national picture tells one part of the story, Mr. McKeever said, but the new tool helps provide more nuance about how specific types of organizations and regions are doing.
For example, you can gauge support for environmental and animal-welfare groups in Alabama by comparing the number of organizations that have seen large or small increases, large or small losses, or no change at all. You can also compare a how a cause attracts money in one state versus another state or across the country.
In 2014, the most recent year for which data is available, 36 percent of public charities grew by more than 10 percent over 2013. About 28 percent saw their gross revenues fell by more than 10 percent during the same period.
Urban Institute researchers will write a series of blog posts based on data analysis in the coming weeks. You can download the tool’s data for free.
