Nonprofits found within NAViHH draw from Candid’s extensive database of U.S.-based 501(c) nonprofits. GuideStar by Candid’s database is the most complete source of information about U.S. charities and other nonprofit organizations in existence. It includes information on more than 1.8 million organizations recognized by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In addition to listings of all 501(c) nonprofits registered with the IRS, the Guidestar by Candid platform maintains an active database of self-reported nonprofit information that provides the basis for their proprietary GuideStar Profile Standard Seal of Transparency system. Nonprofits apply to be recognized with the GuideStar bronze, silver, gold, or platinum Seals of Transparency by adhering to the standards and reporting protocols detailed in this guide on Candid’s website. 

Not all U.S. IRS-registered 501(c) organizations are included in NAViHH. Vanguard Charitable, in its sole discretion, selected approximately 168,000 nonprofits (the “Listed Nonprofits”) whose corresponding Philanthropy Classification System (PCS) code are considered, in Vanguard Charitable’s determination, to be highly relevant to the prevention or treatment of either hunger or homelessness. 

Candid’s PCS builds off the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE, from the IRS) to provide a greater level of detail in ascribing salient cause areas to NPOs via tax filings and philanthropic transactions. Candid’s PCS composes several facets: subject, population, organization type, transaction type, support strategy, and geographic area served. A complete description of each facet of the PCS taxonomy can be found here. Inclusion in the NAViHH tool was predicated on the relevance of the subject facet of the PCS taxonomy to either hunger or homelessness. The resulting PCS codes were then agglomerated into nine overarching cause areas by the description of each code (Table 1).

The seed data file of Listed Nonprofits that comprise the NAViHH tool is updated approximately every quarter by Candid. Vanguard Charitable does not guarantee that the data will be updated immediately upon the end of a quarter.
 

Table 1.1: Cause area and corresponding PCS and NTEE codes included in NAViHH. To be included in NAViHH, an NPO must (1) be registered in Candid’s database and (2) have at least one of the listed PCS codes in the table. Vanguard Charitable has provided NTEE codes that correspond to the selected PCS codes; however, the relationship between PCS code and NTEE code is not one-to-one. Therefore, maintaining an NTEE code in this table is not a sufficient requirement to for a NPO to be included as a Listed Nonprofit.

NAViHH is intended for informational purposes and is a nonpartisan, nondiscriminatory platform designed to help donors easily identify registered nonprofits operating in the United States. Inclusion of a Listed Nonprofit on the NAViHH tool in no way indicates Vanguard Charitable’s endorsement of the organization nor implies any affiliation whatsoever between Vanguard Charitable and the Listed Nonprofit. As a cause-neutral organization, Vanguard Charitable does not promote the Listed Nonprofits in any way, nor does it receive any compensation or other consideration for including the Listed

Nonprofits in this tool. In addition, Vanguard Charitable does not guarantee that the Listed Nonprofits are operating a hunger- or homelessness-specific program. Users of the NAViHH tool are responsible for confirming the intended use of their grant and/or establishing any grant restrictions associated with a subsequent donation with the Listed Nonprofit directly.

Individual Listed Nonprofits featured on NAViHH are displayed alongside their corresponding information available through the Candid data set acquired for the purposes of this use case. Information related to the organizations’ federal employer identification numbers (EINs), PCS/NTEE code registrations, logos, mission statements, physical address information, website addresses, year of registration, and financial information, such as IRS filing statuses and revenues, are drawn from the Candid seed data file. 

Vanguard Charitable is not responsible for the accuracy of the data from the Candid seed file that underlies the NAViHH tool. Users of NAViHH should conduct their own thorough, independent research to confirm details of the nonprofit’s physical location, area of operation, standing, service areas, and the existence of hunger- or homelessness-related programming if any. 
 

Representatives of any Listed Nonprofit that would like to correct or update the data relevant to their organization are encouraged to contact Candid and claim their GuideStar profile. Corrected files will be displayed on the map at the conclusion of the next regularly scheduled seed data file refresh. Vanguard Charitable cannot guarantee that Candid will make the specific correction requested by the organization. We regret that we cannot make changes, corrections, or amendments to individual nonprofit listings on an ad hoc basis at this time. 

Any nonprofit that provides programming relevant to hunger or homelessness and is not present in the NAViHH tool is encouraged to contact Candid directly  to update its registered PCS codes.

NAViHH offers a wizard functionality that guides users through each of the available filters on the site; alternatively, users may select filters from the main page. Results of user searches based on selected filters are displayed in the selected sort order. Sort order options include hunger/homelessness severity, total revenue, GuideStar ratings, and alphabetical listings.

The NAViHH tool allows users to filter search results on five nonprofit metrics available from the Candid seed file: cause area, location, GuideStar rating, revenue/size, and established date.

Cause area

The provided cause areas were selected at Vanguard Charitable’s sole discretion. These cause areas correspond to the selected PCS codes, as defined in Table 1.1. The default behavior of the NAViHH tool is to include all cause areas in the search results.

Location

In the Charity Finding Wizard, users may initialize the map interface to the national scale, their location, or a preferred zip code. Users can also toggle between filtering results to their current map view or not. Nonprofit locations are displayed on the map based on organizations’ physical addresses as reported to the IRS and GuideStar by Candid by the Listed Nonprofits. Vanguard Charitable cannot guarantee that an organization’s displayed physical location corresponds to the service area it serves. 

In some cases, the seed data file's information about the Listed Nonprofit did not include latitude and longitude coordinates or lacked a county assignment. In these cases, a geocoder was implemented to generate locations for those charities based on the provided addresses. Vanguard Charitable is not responsible for the accuracy of the location data about the Listed Nonprofits provided or the geocoded results based on said provided data. 

The GuideStar by Candid’s Seal of Transparency is a free, voluntary program that allows qualified U.S.-based nonprofit organizations to earn Seals of Transparency when they submit information about their organization to the GuideStar by Candid platform. Maintaining a seal requires that a NPO updates its information annually. Seals are awarded based on the disclosure requirements listed in Table 2.1. The purpose of the Seals of Transparency program is to recognize a nonprofit’s commitment to transparent communication about its function, purpose, staff, and programming. However, the absence of a GuideStar Seal of Transparency in a Listed Nonprofit’s profile card in no way implies that a Listed Nonprofit is not in good standing.

Table 2.1: Available GuideStar Seal of Transparency ratings with reporting requirements for each seal level. Each seal requires all the requirements of all previous seals in addition to the listed requirements. *The organization can also report not having the listed resource. **Either for 2019 or 2020. ***The organization can decline to state these metrics.

In the Charity Finding Wizard, Listed Nonprofits may be filtered by size as determined by the Listed Nonprofit’s filing status with the IRS. These size classifications (small, medium, large) reflect the IRS’ filing requirements for nonprofits based on a nonprofit’s reported gross receipts and/or total assets, as noted in Table 2.2. For the purposes of the NAViHH tool, all Listed Nonprofits that do not file a 990 or 990EZ form with the IRS are classified as ‘small’. Listed Nonprofits that have a 990EZ form for the previous year on file with the IRS are classified as ‘medium’. Listed Nonprofits that have a 990 form on file for the previous year are classified as ‘large’. 

Table 2.2: Financial metrics related to Listed Nonprofit filing form with the IRS.¹

Users of the NAViHH tool may also filter charities by selecting a range of acceptable establishment dates. This is a required field in the Candid data set and therefore has complete coverage over all the Listed Nonprofits.

The ’Similar Nonprofits’ feature aims to enhance donor exploration of the nonprofit landscape. The algorithm behind this function is predicated on an item-based recommendation schema that examines nonprofit features exclusively. Similarity is computed by examining the nonprofit’s location and its mission statement and relating those characteristics to the mission statements of all other organizations in the NAViHH dataset. 

To be included in the Similar Nonprofits feature, organizations must have a sufficiently descriptive mission statement in their Candid (formerly Guidestar) profile, as determined by the length of the statement. Our approach aims to incorporate both domain-specific terminology and broader organizational values and goals to provide tailored recommendations.

Accessing & Using the Similar Nonprofits Feature

Similar Nonprofits are listed on charity cards displayed in the NAViHH search feature. Note that selecting the ‘thumbs down’ button will remove the specified charity from the similar nonprofits list and can be reversed by resetting the browser cache. Selecting the “Apply Filters” checkbox within the feature will overlay the user’s previously selected NAViHH filters to the Similar Nonprofits list that is displayed. Selecting this setting is recommended for viewing nonprofits that are geographically proximal to the reference charity.

The NAViHH tool provides two data overlays to inform users of geographies of great need in the areas of hunger or homelessness. Both data sets have been processed and rescaled to compare across the United States. The metric that underlies each map's overlays is the 2019 per capita rate, reflecting the most recent projections for each cause. The raw count data of individuals experiencing food insecurity or homelessness is transformed using the U. S. Census Bureau’s annual county-level population data set.²  

The hunger map is derived from Feeding America^®’s food Map the Meal Gap data set,³ which is updated annually. This data set presents rates of food insecurity down to the county level for all U.S. states and counties. Feeding America^® relies on U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) food insecurity measures and then combines other key determinants of food need in its model, including unemployment rates, median incomes, and other factors. The estimates rely on publicly available data for all counties and congressional districts. These indicators are assessed annually to ensure that each metric is appropriately considered when projecting food insecurity on the county level.

Hunger severity is calculated at two distinct resolutions within the NAViHH tool and is dependent on the user’s current magnification of the map interface–national or intrastate. At each scale, the number of food-insecure persons is normalized by the population at the county level. The resulting per capita food insecurity is then rescaled using min-max normalization (Equation 3.1),

(x-min⁡(x))/(max⁡(x)-min⁡(x) )                    (3.1)

where, x, denotes a county’s per capita food insecurity. At the national scale, each county is normalized concerning all counties in the United States. At the intrastate scale, each county is only rescaled with respect for other counties in the same state. A county is then assigned a severity score (low, medium, high, severe) dependent on its rank-ordered position to other counties (e.g., counties that fall in the top fourth of a given resolution’s distribution would be assigned the “severe” severity score). When sorting by severity, the national-scale non-discretized per capita rate is used, which allows for the rank-ordering of the Listed Nonprofits.
 

The homelessness map is derived from U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data sets, specifically its Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.⁴ The homelessness map overlay relies on part I of the AHAR, which is predicated on Point-in-Time (PIT) estimates. PIT estimates offer a snapshot of both sheltered and unsheltered homelessness on a single night. The one-night counts are conducted during the last ten days of January each year. The PIT counts also estimate of the number of people experiencing homelessness within particular populations, such as individuals with chronic patterns of homelessness and veterans experiencing homelessness.

The AHAR provides data at the continuum of care (CoC) level, which typically includes sections of various counties and sometimes states. As such, these data are aggregated to the state level. Like the methodology underlying the computation of hunger severity (Section 3.1), the aggregated PIT homelessness counts are normalized by population to obtain per capita homelessness. Due to the decrease in resolution, these data are only rescaled via Equation 3.1 at the state level. The resulting data are then rank-ordered and divided into quartiles where a greater underlying per capita rate of homelessness corresponds to a higher homeless severity score.