Skip to content
Plinth

Glossary

Mission embedding

A numeric representation of what an organization says it does, used to compare missions.

An embedding turns the mission and program text an organization wrote on its own return into a list of numbers, positioned so that organizations describing similar work land near each other. It is what makes portfolio themes, clusters and look-alike scoring possible without hand-labeling every organization.

It compares stated purpose, not results. Two organizations with near-identical descriptions may differ completely in scale, quality or who they reach, and a similar mission is not a recommendation.

See it in the data

Related terms

Questions and answers

What is a mission embedding?
A numeric representation of what an organization says it does, used to compare missions. An embedding turns the mission and program text an organization wrote on its own return into a list of numbers, positioned so that organizations describing similar work land near each other. It is what makes portfolio themes, clusters and look-alike scoring possible without hand-labeling every organization.

More from the funding graph