Over the past year, I've studied 1,648 Form 990 filings for nonprofits across 12 metro areas and sorted them into seven groups, based on how their money is structured.
The filings show what came in, what went out, and what was left at the end of the year, which we all know doesn't fully capture what it actually takes to run a nonprofit.
Nonprofits get compared to each other as though they're all the same kind of entity, and the mismatch costs them: advice that doesn't fit, benchmarks that don't apply, misaligned funder expectations. The organizations holding our communities together deserve more than generic advice.
What I'm working towards is a research basis that makes it easier for leaders to find peers and compare notes with organizations actually built the same way and to create partnerships between organizations whose models fit together instead of competing. I'm also building a case I can bring to funders about what supportive funding looks like for each kind of organization, with enough specifics in it to act on.
Funders are asking how they can be stronger partners. I'm inviting you to help me shape the narrative that will become a case for support that reflects the nuanced reality of a complex nonprofit sector.
Senior leadership and board members, so executive directors, CEOs, finance leads, board chairs, treasurers, and board members generally. You're the right person if you've held one of those roles at any point since 2022, whether you started last year and are still there or led through that stretch and have since moved on. If you were in one of these roles further back than that, you're welcome here too, though your answers get read as history rather than matched against current filings.
One response per person, and if you serve more than one organization, pick whichever you know best. If a colleague or a board member at the same organization also wants to participate, they are welcome to do so, though I'd ask that they hold a different role (ideally not two board members from the same org, for example).
Around 15 minutes if you keep your written answers short, 20 to 30 if you'd rather say more. Most of it is multiple choice, there are no right or wrong answers, and I'm not judging anyone personally.
If your organization files a full Form 990 and you leave your email at the end, I'll follow up within two weeks with which of the seven groups it falls into and what that group looks like across the dataset. If you'd rather skip leaving an email, or you'd like a copy of everything you wrote here today, reach out using the contact info at the end and I'll send either one directly. It won't include a financial health rating either way, because reading whether an organization is doing well takes context a screening can't carry.
A written profile of each group, published free on this site this winter, in the words of the people running them.
One thing: if you include your email at the end of the survey, I'll write once with your archetype classification, within two weeks. Nothing else lands automatically. If you check a box opting in for a follow-up, a call/video interview, or I have a question regarding your quote permission confirmation, I'll write for that reason. A copy of your own answers is something you'd need to ask me for directly and is not automatically delivered in alignment with the confidentiality outlined in the prior section.
Every organization in my published research is anonymized, and you can see how that's handled throughout the research on this site. Your answers save as you go, so you can close this and come back. Questions or deletion requests: nicole@thefinancialforest.com.
I'm Nicole Segura, and The Financial Forest is my research and consulting practice. It exists because an organization running on government contracts and an organization running on individual donors face genuinely different problems, and a single sector-wide benchmark applied to both of them fails both of them.
A complicated problem demands a creative and thoughtful solution. So I sorted 1,648 organizations into seven groups by how their money is actually built, and compare organizations only against others built the same way. That analysis supports published research, written guides for each group, and Bearings, a benchmarking tool for nonprofit leaders and their advisors.
This study is its own piece of that work, and what you write becomes part of the public profile of your group.