Identifying essential nonprofits with a novel NLP Method

In this research note, we propose a classification method for identifying whether 501c3 nonprofit organization is considered essential economic recovery. During the first few months of COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations experienced negative financial effects from recession. While these nonprofits saw increased demand their services, weakness in overall economy led to decline donations. Fiscal assistance by local, state, and federal government was critical element an recovery, governments needed prioritize aid most first. By advance, could quickly efficiently receive assistance. Using descriptive text data provided Ohio IRS tax filings, novel natural language processing (NLP) technique measure degree “essentialness” nonprofit's work. We show that our model offers improvement system known as National Taxonomy Exempt Organizations (NTEE). Our machine learning also compared independent evaluation essentialness produced human researchers.