Nonprofits and philanthropy meet people’s essential needs, power civic engagement, boost economies, and enrich lives. For 30 years, the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy has equipped changemakers with the data and insights they need to support the nonprofit and philanthropic sector and the vital role it plays in every community.
What types of communities do nonprofit organizations serve? How much of a nonprofit’s funding comes from individual donations versus foundations or government? Who leads and works at nonprofits?
These are the types of questions the Nonprofit Trends Tracker can answer.
For 30 years, the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy (CNP) has been a trusted source for high-quality data, evidence, and analysis on nonprofit organizations, charitable giving, and philanthropy. Through rigorous research, accessible data, and expert convenings, we equip changemakers with the information they need to support the organizations meeting essential needs, powering civic engagement, boosting economies, and improving quality of life in every community.
As nonprofits, philanthropy, and civil society navigate economic uncertainty, shifting public policy environments, and growing demand, CNP is using its unique datasets and evidence, close sector partnerships, and expertise in policy and practice to help changemakers understand the sector’s past, navigate the present, and build resilience for the future.
CNP collects, analyzes, and publishes robust and reliable data on nonprofit organizations, charitable giving and philanthropy, and civil society. Our work has explored social sector infrastructure, the effects of government funding disruptions on nonprofits, the norms and narratives that shape giving, impact investing, and more. Below we highlight select bodies of work and data sources.
Our nationally representative National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts supplements information available from the IRS to shed light on the experiences of service-providing nonprofits. It provides data more quickly and on a wider array of topics than government sources. The survey data are accessible through our Nonprofit Trends Tracker, public use data files, and on Urban’s Data Catalogue.
CNP’s National Center for Charitable Statistics also offers several data resources on the nonprofit sector:
The Giving Dashboard synthesizes the most comprehensive, significant, and recent data available on giving, defined expansively to extend well beyond donations to tax-exempt nonprofits, to provide a snapshot of the many ways Americans give and illuminate the dominant trends shaping the contemporary giving landscape in the United States.
The History of Philanthropy project features robust case studies of notable philanthropic initiatives and campaigns for social and policy change, with a particular emphasis on questions of causal attribution, making use of the attention to multicausal complexity, deep context, and contingency that rigorous historical inquiry conveys.
We make it easy for social sector infrastructure leaders, advocates, funders, policymakers, the media, and the public to understand our data and analyses and use them to accomplish their unique goals.
We work directly with state and local leaders to help them understand the challenges and opportunities that the service-providing nonprofits in their communities face. Using representative data from the National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts, we’ve partnered with organizations in Massachusetts and Tennessee to raise awareness of the survey, contextualize findings for their local nonprofit landscapes, develop actionable fact sheets, and share insights with stakeholders across their states. Together, we created state-specific resources to offer tailored insights that can help the states better support their vital nonprofit and philanthropic sectors.
We also make our data and analyses publicly available and easily accessible. In addition to research reports and briefs, CNP regularly publishes short articles that translate our data into policy- and practice-relevant insights. We also offer several interactive tools and databases that allow people to view and share timely insights into key trends and dynamics shaping the social sector:
CNP hosts dynamic public and private events that bring together experts in policy, practice, and scholarship to surface emerging trends in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors, address the major challenges they face, and produce evidence and insights to help the sectors imagine and prepare for the future.
CNP’s hallmark event is our biennial Giving Innovation Summit. Past summits have focused on topics like workplace giving, the norms and narratives that shape charitable and philanthropic giving, the place of pluralism in charitable giving, and the democratization of giving.
Want to work with us? Email us to get the conversation started.
Nonprofits and philanthropy are essential to thriving communities and economies. Yet when the Urban Institute founded the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy (CNP) in 1996, there were limited reliable data and research on the nonprofit and philanthropic sector.
CNP helped change that. For three decades, our rigorous research, accessible data, and cross-sector insights have shaped understanding of trends in nonprofit organizations and in charitable giving and philanthropy.
In celebration of 30 years of data, insights, and analysis, read more about CNP’s major milestones and explore our 30th anniversary events below.
We’re hosting a series of public events highlighting some of CNP’s key research areas. Each event is structured around the distinctive lenses that we apply to our work, with an eye to the past, present, and future of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector. These events bring together leaders from policy, practice, and scholarship to discuss how the sector can respond to complex challenges and shape what comes next.
1996: Urban founds CNP and acquires the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) from Independent Sector.
1996–2008: With input from GuideStar and the Foundation Center, NCCS revises and updates the classification system for nonprofits, the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE), which the IRS adopts.
1997–2016: NCCS compiles data and publishes nine editions of the Nonprofit Almanac.
1999: CNP publishes the first of three editions of Nonprofits and Government: Collaboration and Conflict. Later editions were published in 2006 and 2016.
2003: CNP conducts major nationally representative surveys of family philanthropy, foundation effectiveness, nonprofit governance, and volunteer management practices.
2004: CNP collaborates with the Lilly School at Indiana University on the Overhead Cost Study (PDF), which produces guides for nonprofits and financial professionals.
2006: CNP develops the Fundraising Effectiveness Project with the Association of Fundraising Professionals.
2010: CNP launches the Nonprofit-Government Contracts and Grants Project.
2015: CNP joins with Columbia University’s Charities Regulatory and Oversight Project to launch the Regulation Of Nonprofits And Philanthropy Project.
2017: CNP hosts its first Giving Innovation Summit.
2019: CNP launches the History of Philanthropy initiative.
2021: CNP launches the Nonprofit Trends and Impacts study.
2022: CNP launches the Social Sector Infrastructure Project.
2026: CNP will launch the Democracy and Civil Society initiative in the fall.
