Launching GiveScope: Financial Intelligence for 1.9 Million U.S. Nonprofits

The U.S. nonprofit sector controls $4.09 trillion in annual revenue — larger than the GDP of Germany. There are 1.93 million tax-exempt organizations, from neighborhood food banks to hospital systems with billions in revenue. And yet, understanding how these organizations actually perform financially has been surprisingly difficult. We built GiveScope to change that.

Why We Built GiveScope

The IRS publishes Form 990 data for every tax-exempt organization in America. It's one of the richest public datasets in existence — revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, executive compensation, program expenses, and more. But it's buried in bulk CSV files and XML dumps that nobody can use.

Existing platforms like Charity Navigator and Candid do a decent job rating the largest charities, but they cover a fraction of the 1.93 million organizations. And their data is often locked behind paywalls or limited to basic star ratings that don't tell the full story.

GiveScope takes a different approach: every nonprofit gets a financial profile. We process the IRS Business Master File (1.93M organizations) and enrich the top 100,000 with multi-year filing histories from ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer API. Then we compute health scores, peer benchmarks, and trend analysis on top of that raw data.

Health Scores: A 9-Metric Financial Model

Every enriched nonprofit gets a health score from 0 to 100, computed from nine financial metrics across three tiers:

• Tier 1 — Core Financial Health (60 pts): Working capital ratio, surplus consistency, liabilities ratio, revenue trend
• Tier 2 — Operational Efficiency (25 pts): Program expense ratio, fundraising efficiency, CEO pay reasonableness
• Tier 3 — Structural Resilience (15 pts): Revenue concentration (HHI), Tuckman-Chang vulnerability flags

The model draws on academic research — particularly the Tuckman-Chang framework for nonprofit financial vulnerability — combined with practical indicators that donors and analysts actually care about. The average score across our enriched dataset is 65.7, with grades ranging from A (excellent) to F (critical concern).

What You Can Do on GiveScope

• Search any nonprofit by name, EIN, city, or state — instant results across 1.93M organizations
• Explore financial profiles — revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, executive compensation, filing history
• Compare organizations with peer benchmarking — see how any nonprofit stacks up against its category and state
• Track trends — 5-year revenue and expense charts for enriched organizations
• Browse rankings — highest revenue, fastest growing, healthiest, highest-paid CEOs by state
• Read analysis — 27 data-driven articles on nonprofit sectors, CEO pay, transparency, and more
• Use interactive tools — compensation benchmarking, donation calculator, nonprofit quiz, nearby search

The Surprising Things in the Data

Building GiveScope revealed some striking facts about the nonprofit sector:

• 33% of nonprofits have declining revenue — roughly 640,000 organizations saw revenue drop in their most recent filings
• The top 1% controls 85-90% of revenue — about 19,000 organizations out of 1.93M control the vast majority of the sector's $4.09 trillion
• Kaiser Permanente's $82.5B revenue is larger than the GDP of 120+ countries
• 90% of nonprofits operate on less than $1M/year — the sector is dominated by small organizations
• Religion has the most organizations (199,983) but Healthcare has the most revenue ($2.5T)

Free + Pro Tiers

Basic access to GiveScope is free — search, browse profiles, read analysis, use tools. For researchers, journalists, and organizations that need deeper analysis, we offer Pro ($49/mo) and Team ($149/mo) tiers with trend charts, CSV exports, compensation benchmarking, grant flow mapping, and email alerts.

Part of TheDataProject Portfolio

GiveScope is our newest platform, joining:

• OpenMedicare — $854B in Medicare payments with ML fraud detection
• OpenMedicaid — $1.09 trillion in Medicaid provider payments
• OpenLobby — $37.7B in federal lobbying, 726K+ filings
• WarCosts — Every American war from the Revolution to Iran 2026
• OpenCrime — FBI crime data for 9,700+ cities
• OpenPrescriber — 1.38M Medicare prescribers, $275.6B in drug costs
• VaccineWatch — 1.98M VAERS reports
• OpenImmigration — 9.6M immigration court cases
• OpenSubsidies — $147B in farm subsidies

Explore GiveScope

Visit givescope.com to search any nonprofit, explore financial health scores, compare organizations, and discover where $4 trillion in nonprofit revenue actually goes.

GiveScope is built by TheDataProject.AI — making public data usable, searchable, and accessible to everyone.