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New in Nonprofit Explorer: People Search

You can now search for people who work for nonprofit organizations.

Today we’re launching a new feature in our Nonprofit Explorer database. You can now search for board members and key employees who work at nonprofit organizations by name. The database includes everyone listed on nonprofit tax returns filed electronically between 2014 and 2017. The data includes each person’s reported title and base compensation.

You can find the people search on the Nonprofit Explorer front page if you click on the “Search for People” tab in the blue search box.

You can use this new search feature to, for instance, look into nonprofit boards that Donald Trump — the president as well as his son — are on. As with any people search, some common names will yield some unintended results: See, for instance, the board membership of Donald “Skip” Trump, M.D. (no relation) who is on several nonprofit boards.

Or see the board memberships of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, his Hollywood super-agent brother Ari and their brother Dr. Zeke Emanuel (full name Ezekiel). Or at least, people with those names.

You can click through from the search results right to the Form 990 with that name listed. For those familiar with nonprofit disclosures, the search returns data from a field filled out by nonprofits in their IRS Form 990 tax returns called “Compensation of Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, Highest Compensated Employees, and Independent Contractors.”

The data was extracted from the huge IRS data release by Jacob Fenton, who is publishing an open source project based on the work he did for Nonprofit Explorer, along with a trove of reference materials.

The people search feature builds on an update we launched last year that lets you view the full text of millions of nonprofit returns. Like that update, this one is made possible thanks to a lawsuit brought by Public.Resource.Org that required the IRS to release electronically filed Form 990s in a structured data format.

The Nonprofit Explorer people search is available for the years released as raw data by the IRS. So while we have nonprofit information going back to at least 2012, people search only goes back to filings from 2014. You may find older tax years in people search because sometimes nonprofits file or amend returns from previous years.

Millions of people have used Nonprofit Explorer to check up on nonprofits, including journalists, researchers and everyday users looking to understand charities before they donate to them.

Portrait of Scott Klein

Scott Klein

Scott Klein was a deputy managing editor. He led the teams at ProPublica that work at the intersection of journalism and technology.

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