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governance DOI

R package for creating a nonprofit governance index score from IRS Form 990 efile data. It normalizes the governance and management fields of the 990 into a binary feature matrix, then scores them against a factor model derived empirically from the full filing population for benchmarking.

governance scores; it does not download data. Retrieving and assembling the 990 efile tables is handled by the companion panel990 package, which governance calls for you through get_governance_data() and get_governance_scores().

Installation 

devtools::install_github( 'nonprofit-open-data-collective/governance' )

Usage

The workflow is two steps: normalize raw 990 fields into features with get_features(), then score them with get_scores().

Step 1: Get input data

The index uses Form 990 Parts IV, VI, and XII and Schedule M, and applies to full 990 filers only (not 990EZ). get_governance_data() handles the retrieval, the full-990 filter, and the merge:

# remotes::install_github("Nonprofit-Open-Data-Collective/panel990")
dat <- get_governance_data(years = 2022)          # one row per filing, ready for get_features()
scores <- get_governance_scores(years = 2022)     # or the whole pipeline in one call

See the Download Data vignette for the required tables, the field list, and the panel990 workflow.

The package also ships a ready-to-use example (a 5,000-organization sample of raw 2022 fields) so you can try the workflow without downloading anything:

data("dat_example", package = "governance")

set.seed(57)
dat_example <- dat_example[sample(seq_len(nrow(dat_example)), 200), ]

Step 2: Build the feature matrix 

features_example <- get_features(dat_example)

Step 3: Calculate the scores 

scores_example <- get_scores(features_example)

get_scores() appends six factor scores and a total.score. See the Governance Workflow vignette for a fuller walk-through and the Making Governance Scores vignette for the methodology.

Citing the package