Introducing Candid’s U.S. Social Sector Dashboard, Chapter 1

By Anna Koob | October 20, 2021

Woman reaching out to draw on a dashboard on the wall

What’s the story of the social sector? And perhaps more fundamentally, what is the social sector? In the United States, the social sector employs over 12 million people (roughly the combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles) and generates more than $3.7 trillion in aggregate annual revenue (a sum greater than President Biden’s $3.5 trillion infrastructure package). To begin to tell this story, today Candid is launching its U.S. Social Sector Dashboard. The dashboard serves as an annually updated, publicly accessible tool that provides definitional context and data about the organizations, money, and people that make up the sector in the United States.

Why a dashboard? Why this dashboard?

Making data available to those who need it is core to Candid’s mission. One way we do this is through tools like GuideStar and Foundation Directory, which typically serve specific users working in the social sector who are looking to answer specific questions. Candid’s data about organizations and grantmaking is also powerful in the aggregate, going beyond specific use cases to answer fundamental questions about the size and the scope of the nonprofit and social sectors. At Candid we saw an opportunity and felt a responsibility to provide an approachable, holistic picture, democratizing data that can be useful for organizational benchmarking or context-setting for research and journalism.

Three people speaking, indicated by yellow lines.

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