Sources
Every source behind a figure
The spine of this site is the IRS Form 990 corpus. Not every number on it comes from a filing: some sources are official records about an organization, some are statistics about a place, and some are modeled rather than measured. Each one below gives its publisher, how it joins, and its limits.
Every row also carries its license, whether commercial use is permitted, whether attribution is a condition, and the date someone read the terms. A source whose terms do not permit the way we use it is removed from the product rather than footnoted here, which is why no row below says commercial use is not permitted.
How the filings become figures is on methodology. How well the matching works, measured, is on data quality. What we withhold is on redactions.
Filed
The organization stated this on its own IRS return.
The filer's own words on a named, linkable filing, so the only question is whether they filed accurately. Figures lag 12 to 24 months and are dated to the fiscal year they came from.
- Form 990, 990-EZ and 990-PF e-file XMLIRS · Government
The spine. Grants and their recipients, financials, the governance roster, program narrative, balance-sheet assets and itemized 990-PF holdings, and foreign recipients' ISO country.
- How it joins
- The filer's own EIN. Each figure links to the filing it was read from.
- Limits
- E-filed returns only, so paper filers are absent. The IRS releases 12 to 24 months after the activity, so the most recent complete year lags today.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
Official
Another government record about this organization, not its own filing.
Primary and authoritative, but published by someone other than the organization and often joined to it by name rather than EIN, which carries match risk. Each source has its own revision cadence, so a screen is only as current as the file behind it.
- Exempt Organizations Business Master FileIRS · Government
Organization identity: legal name, EIN, address, NTEE cause code, subsection, ruling date.
- How it joins
- EIN.
- Limits
- The BMF's legal name is often worse than the filer's own: abbreviated, misspelled, or with the leading article moved to the end. We prefer the name on the filing.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
- Publication 78, Auto-Revocation List, Internal Revenue BulletinIRS · Government
Deductibility status, revoked exemptions, and reinstatements announced in the Bulletin.
- How it joins
- EIN for Pub 78 and auto-revocation. The Bulletin can only be matched on name.
- Limits
- A name-only match cannot be certain it found the right organization. A source we could not read reports as not screened, never as clear.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
- OFAC sanctions lists (SDN and Consolidated)US Treasury · Government
Sanctions screening against primary and alias names.
- How it joins
- Name only. Treasury publishes no EIN.
- Limits
- Name screening returns possible matches, not determinations. A common organization name can collide with a listed entity.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
- Registry of Charitable Trusts and FTB revocationsCalifornia Attorney General; CA Franchise Tax Board · Government
California registration status and whether an organization may solicit in the state.
- How it joins
- EIN where published, otherwise name.
- Limits
- California only. The AG page publishes several files on different schedules, so the registry is only as current as the oldest file behind a given screen.
- License
- California state government work — published as public domain · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-22 (oag.ca.gov/conditions and the ca.gov Conditions of Use both read)The Attorney General's conditions of use say the information on the site "is considered in the public domain" and "may be distributed or copied as permitted by law", with a carve-out for copyrighted material such as photographs, which is not what we read.
- USAspendingUS federal government · Government
Federal grants and contracts awarded to a nonprofit, by agency, program and year.
- How it joins
- Confidence-scored name and location match. USAspending identifies recipients by UEI, not EIN, so there is no key to join on.
- Limits
- We favor precision over recall, and leave an award off rather than attach it to the wrong organization. Read the federal total as a floor.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
- State transparency portalsNine state governments · Government
State agency payments and grants to nonprofits.
- How it joins
- EIN where the portal publishes one.
- Limits
- Nine states, not fifty. There is no national standard, so an absent state means we have not ingested it, never that no funding exists.
- License
- State public records, published as-is; no reuse license asserted · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-22 (portal terms read; Connecticut and Delaware quoted below as the pattern)Nine state checkbooks, nine sets of terms, and not one of them asserts a license or a non-commercial restriction. Connecticut publishes "as a public service on an 'as is' basis"; Delaware says "all data that has been published on the Open Data Portal has been determined to be public data by the agency providing the data". Both reserve the right to discontinue a dataset at any time, which is a freshness risk rather than a licensing one.
- Portals
- CTDEFLMAMDNJOKORVT
- Charity Commission registerCharity Commission for England and Wales · Government
UK charity identity, finances and the named trustee roster.
- How it joins
- Registered charity number, and trustees by a stable trustee_id, which makes UK interlocks identity-based rather than name-matched.
- Limits
- England and Wales only. It does not join to US organizations.
- License
- Open Government Licence v3.0 (Crown copyright) · commercial use permitted · attribution required · checked 2026-08-22 (register download page read)OGL v3.0 permits commercial reuse and requires an attribution statement, which is this one: contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Context
A statistic about a place, joined by geography. Never about the organization.
Describes the area a recipient's address sits in, not the recipient itself. A grantee headquartered in a high-poverty ZIP may serve a wider or entirely different area, so read these as the setting a grant was made in, never as an outcome or a reach claim.
- American Community Survey (5-year) and SAIPEUS Census Bureau · Government
Poverty baselines at block-group grain, and annual county poverty from SAIPE.
- How it joins
- Geography: the recipient's ZIP, mapped to tract or county.
- Limits
- A 5-year average cannot show single-year movement, which is why annual county figures come from SAIPE instead. Describes an area, not any organization in it.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
- PLACESCDC · Government
Tract-level health measures, including uninsured rate and food insecurity.
- How it joins
- Geography, at census tract.
- Limits
- Model-based estimates, not measured counts. They describe a tract average, and say nothing about any individual organization or the people it serves.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
- Eviction LabPrinceton University · Academic
Eviction filings per 100 renter households, as a housing-need dimension.
- How it joins
- Geography, at census tract.
- Limits
- Model-based estimates. Coverage is uneven between jurisdictions, with known freshness gaps, so it is not a universal measure.
- License
- ODC-BY 1.0 · commercial use permitted · attribution required · checked 2026-08-21 (license name as recorded in pipeline/sources.json; deposit page not re-read)Attribution is a LICENSE CONDITION, not a courtesy: Gromis et al., Estimating Eviction Prevalence across the United States, Princeton University Eviction Lab.
- Opportunity AtlasUS Census Bureau (CES), with Opportunity Insights · Government
Intergenerational economic mobility for a tract.
- How it joins
- Geography, at census tract.
- Limits
- Built from the tax records of a 1978 to 1983 birth cohort, so it is historical mobility rather than current conditions. A neighborhood may have changed since.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105); Census CES public-use table · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-22 (Census CES public-use data-tables page read)The tract tables are published by the Census Bureau's Center for Economic Studies, and that is the copy we ingest. Opportunity Insights mirrors the same tables and states no license of its own, so the Census release is the one the position rests on.
- Food Access Research AtlasUSDA · Government
Whether a tract is low-income and low-access, the standard food-desert flag.
- How it joins
- Geography, at census tract.
- Limits
- A binary flag on a distance threshold, so it describes access to a supermarket, not diet or need.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
- GeoNames gazetteerGeoNames · Nonprofit
Turning a place name written on a filing into a known place with coordinates.
- How it joins
- Place name, snapped to a gazetteer entry.
- Limits
- A gazetteer match is snapped to a known place; an unrecognized name is left unresolved.
- License
- CC BY 4.0 · commercial use permitted · attribution required · checked 2026-08-22 (geonames.org license statement read)CC BY 4.0 permits commercial use and requires credit, which is this row: place-name resolution uses the GeoNames geographical database, https://www.geonames.org/.
- TIGER/Line shapefilesUS Census Bureau · Government
County and tract boundaries, so a coordinate becomes a FIPS code.
- How it joins
- Point in polygon.
- Limits
- Boundaries are revised between vintages, so a tract id is only meaningful with the year it was drawn for.
- License
- US Government work — public domain (17 U.S.C. 105) · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-21 (statutory basis; no portal terms read)
Inferred
Derived by a model from text, not read from a record.
The weakest class. A language model or an embedding produced it from prose, so it is directional: useful for finding something worth verifying, not evidence on its own. Each one keeps the source it was drawn from.
- Organization websites and public newsRetrieved by Plinth via Exa · Commercial
Partnerships and collaborations between organizations, extracted by a language model.
- How it joins
- Name resolution back to the grantee roster, kept only where it matches.
- Limits
- A model reading prose. Directional, gated behind a click, framed as a question, and each edge keeps the URL it came from so it can be checked.
- License
- Third-party web content, retrieved under a commercial search contract · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-22 (use model reviewed, not a per-publisher license)There is no license to read here, because no page is republished. What is kept is the URL and a model's one-line reading of it, and the URL is shown so the reader goes to the publisher rather than to a copy of it.
- Text embeddingsGoogle Vertex (text-embedding-005), computed by Plinth · Computed by Plinth
Portfolio themes and clusters, look-alike scoring, mission similarity.
- How it joins
- The organization's own mission and program text from its filing.
- Limits
- Similarity of what organizations say they do, not of what they achieve. Not a recommendation.
- License
- Computed by Plinth from public-domain filing text, using Google Cloud under contract · commercial use permitted · checked 2026-08-22 (use model reviewed, not a per-publisher license)The input is the organization's own 990 program text, which is public domain; the vectors are output of a paid service and are ours to use.
Resolved and computed
We worked out an identity the filing did not state. Arithmetic or graph analysis over the classes above. Neither appears above, because both are work done on top of the sources that do. Matching covers how identities are resolved and the ceiling on that; data quality publishes the measured precision, the reach, and the share we decline rather than guess.
A source that feeds a rendered figure belongs on this page. If one is missing, tell us at data@useplinth.com.