By including not just headquarter location, but also service location, the community can better understand nonprofit service areas, and nonprofits may find new partners in which to collaborate for service delivery. Sheila Bravo, President and CEO at Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement

Visualizing nonprofit locations allows you to see where the holes are. PolicyMap provides a lens for Delaware’s philanthropic community to identify and fill in service gaps. Tynetta Brown, President and CEO at Philanthropy Delaware
See how PolicyMap can help your organization.

Challenge

The mission of SHARE Delaware, a collaboration enterprise of Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Advancement and Philanthropy Delaware, is to transform the state’s nonprofit and philanthropy community through universally accessible and useful information for the purpose of inspiring collaboration and driving sustainable impact. For this work, SHARE Delaware needed a way to determine the actual number of nonprofits operating in the state and evaluate the communities in Delaware served by those organizations. But calculating the number of nonprofits operating in the state was not straightforward. While there are over 7,000 nonprofits registered in the State of Delaware, the actual number of organizations operating in the state is significantly smaller because Delaware is a state where many businesses choose to incorporate. To curate an accurate list, SHARE Delaware used financial information from the IRS 990 and 990 EZ tax forms filed by nonprofits. Then, to tell the story of Delaware communities impacted by philanthropic and nonprofit work, SHARE Delaware needed a partner who could marry their unique dataset with a myriad of community-level data.

Solution

SHARE Delaware integrated their data with PolicyMap to create Delaware’s first comprehensive resource housing nonprofits and their programs. The interactive, easy-to-use embedded mapping tool serves everyone, from individuals looking for programs and volunteers searching for a place to serve, to funders and companies wanting to give back to their local community. Through the project, nonprofits and state legislators have access to a variety of information based on the geography type: state, county, cities, specific addresses, zip codes, legislative districts, school districts, and more. PolicyMap’s indicators, including data on housing, healthcare, social determinants of health, and more, tell the story of communities across the state. SHARE Delaware believes this information will aid in grantmaking, policymaking, and other collaborative efforts.