SLP: Nonprofit Information Collection

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This assignment is in lieu of a final exam. For this assignment, you will be assigned a small number of nonprofits for which you have to gather information for.

The purpose of this assignment is to generate a contact list of local nonprofits that can be used to contact them about future offerings of the Service Learning Practicum. This is how the projects for this year were generated.

You can find the nonprofits that you have been assigned in the PostEm tab of the course management tool. Each nonprofit listed will look something like the following:

123456789|ACME Nonprofit Inc.|Charlottesville|VA|United States|PC

The first field is the Federal EIN (the equivalent of a social security number, but for nonprofits). The next four fields are the name, city, state, and country. The last field has to do with the nonprofit's tax deductability status, and we aren't concerned about that here.

Your task is to complete an online Google form once for EACH of the nonprofits that you have been assigned. The URL of the form will be included in the PostEm entry that lists your assigned nonprofits. In particular, you will need to look up additional information about each of your nonprofits. First, start at http://guidestar.org -- you can enter the EIN directly into the search box. This will present you with some (but not all!) of the additional information you need.

You will need to find the nonprofit's website, likely using your favorite search engine. Once looking at that website, you will need to find out additional information about them:

If this information is not available, then fill out the form as best you can, and put comments about this in the 'comments' box at the bottom of the form. Note that you should NOT be making phone calls to gather this information (we don't want to pester the nonprofits!).

This form does input validation on a few of the fields (userid, email, website). And those fields are required. Thus, if there isn't a email address or website available, please enter "nobody@nowhere.com" for the email, or "http://nowhere.com" for the website.

You will also need to determine if this organization fits into any of the following categories. The reason for this is that there are laws and policies that restrict, to different extents, how much we can interact with these types of organizations. You can see more details here, if you are interested. Note that we don't exclude all of these groups -- we just want to know if they fall into these categories.

Then you can fill out the online form (the link of which will be in the PostEm entry). There is a notes field at the end where you can enter any other thoughts or concerns.

This entire process is expected to take approximately one hour.

Questions posed

The following is the list of questions posed on the Google form. All questions except for Categories is a text fill-in; the Categories question is a multiple check-box question.

Due date

The forms must be completed by the end of the last iteration of the semester (by noon on Tuesday).

Grading

If you properly enter all the data for your assigned nonprofits, then you get full credit. If we have to go in and clean up (you mis-enter it, do a shoddy job, etc.), then you get a zero. This grade will count as your final exam (10% of your final grade in the course).

Data source notes

This data was downloaded from https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/forwardToPub78Download.do, and then all nonprofits from Charlottesville and surrounding cities were extracted. That link lists all nonprofits that are sales tax exempt. Note that this list is a proper subset of all nonprofits (as some may not have applied for tax exempt status).