Giving Compass' Take:

• Data science firm Civil Analytics started mapping U.S. nonprofits, analyzing where and how organizations are prioritizing various issues.  

• How will this information help donors discover place-based challenges and funding opportunities? 

• Here are five things nonprofits want donors to know. 

In terms of the sheer number of organizations tackling the problem, the West Coast is a hub for nonprofits interested in youth character development, organizations that offer a safe space for kids to spend time and activities that improve their body, mind, and value systems. In California and Washington, for instance, there are more groups tackling that issue than any other, even pressing local issues like hunger or affordable housing.

But take into account the average funding per organization and the real hub for that slice of the nonprofit sector might be the Midwest. It’s there—in places like Idaho, Nebraska, and Oklahoma—that groups receive the most money to do their work.

That’s according new maps developed by Civis Analytics, a data science firm that recently analyzed public tax filings within the sector to spot hidden trends for Fast Company. To do it, Civis worked with the IRS and Amazon Web Services to secure and review the public tax filings of 353,000 nonprofits.

Roughly 1.4 million nonprofits operate in America, accounting for roughly 10% of all jobs in the private sector. Civis’s map provides a general overview for what kind of work is being prioritized in different places, so that experts can start figuring out why some trends are happening and start asking questions about group effectiveness.

“The nonprofit sector in the United States is huge,” says Scarlett Swerdlow, the director of applied data science at Civis. “This is a way for us go deeper and understand the needs that the nonprofit sector is serving and which organizations are receiving the most support and funding to do that work.”

Read the full article about mapping every nonprofit by Ben Paynter at Fast Company.