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:

• A primary email contact (it may be a general "contact us" type of email) -- this is the email address to contact them with future SLP offerings
  • If there is a person's name associated with that email, note that as well
• A secondary email contact, if one is available and appropriate
  • If there is a person's name associated with that email, note that as well
• The name of the executive director (or head of school, or whatever the person-in-charge is called)
• A brief summary of what they do; one or two sentences is fine, but it must make it clear what the nonprofit's purpose is

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.

• Political organization: these are organizations that have a political purpose. This includes political parties, as well as SuperPACs and organizations whose purpose is lobbying (or hiring lobbyists).
• Religious purposed organizations: these are organizations whose goal is to promote a religion. This includes churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. A secular nonprofit run by a religious organization, such as a church running a soup kitchen, does not count for this category, since the purpose is secular, even though the organization is religious. An organization that helps individuals by preaching to them a given religion would qualify for this category.
• Social organizations: fraternities, sororities, social clubs, etc. Anything where the primary purpose is to promote social interaction between the members.
• Athletic organizations or leagues: soccer teams, rugby leagues, etc. Anything where the primary purpose is to allow the playing of one sport (or other athletic activity). A nonprofit that teaches children how to play a sport is not considered in this category, as the purpose of that is education, not playing a sport.
• Is part of UVa: if it is an organization that is part of UVa (the health center, etc.), then that would qualify for this category. A nonprofit that works with UVa, or that interacts with UVa, or that was started by somebody at UVa does not qualify for this category.
• Private school or PTO: if the nonprofit is a private school (specifically, a school where tuition is required to participate in the nonprofit), or a PTO organization that supports a (public or private) school, or similar, then that would qualify for this category.
• Scholarship fund: any fund whose purpose is to raise money for individuals to attend any type of school (public, private, college, etc.) falls into this category.

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.

• Your UVa userid (Just the 'mst3k' part, not the full email)
• Nonprofit's name
• Nonprofit's EIN
• Nonprofit's city (We assume it's in Virginia; if not, please specify that as well as the city name)
• Primary email contact address
• Primary email contact's name (List "general" if it appears to be a group email)
• Secondary email contact address
• Secondary email contact's name (List "general" if it appears to be a group email)
• Executive Director's name (This could also be "head of school", or whatever the person-in-charge is named; if you cannot figure it out, please put "unavailable")
• Summary of what the nonprofit does (One or two sentences here is fine)
• Categories (Do not guess at this! See the assignment for details.); this is a multiple check-box question, and the possibilities are listed and described above.
• Notes or other comments

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).