One breakdown available in mySidewalk’s IRS 990 data is “activity type.” These categories describe the primary activity of nonprofit organizations. They're self-reported by nonprofits in the form of National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) codes.

According to the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS; the original authors of the NTEE classification system):

"The National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities (NTEE) is a descriptive taxonomy that helps regulators and researchers aggregate data for statistical analysis."

In mySidewalk, we refer to these codes as “activity types,” because they are broadly descriptive of the things nonprofit organizations do to impact different subject matter areas.

For example, an organization that self-reports as an “Arts, Culture and Humanities” organization (NTEE common code A), will be engaged in activities that seek to influence that topic in their community.

In total, there are 26 possible “common codes” within the NTEE classification system, and over 600 more detailed “core codes.” Data in mySidewalk is summarized by common codes, listed below. A full list of codes and their descriptions can be found on the NCCS website.

It is possible for nonprofit organizations to report more than one NTEE code, or to provide more detailed codes than we currently use. In either case, we only report the first-listed code, summarized to the “common code” level of detail.

Some nonprofit organizations do not self-report their NTEE code. In many cases, those who fail to do so are subsidiary organizations of larger nonprofits, e.g. local Masonic Lodges. For others, it is self-evident which codes they belong to, e.g. most churches and religious affinity groups would be categorized under “X: Religion-Related.”

mySidewalk attempts to fill in these missing categories. For the 2021 tax year, this resulted in a reduction of missing NTEE data by over 50%. We automatically assigned organizations who did not self-report a NTEE code, and were not otherwise classifiable, to category “Z: Unknown”.