In Swiss Register of Commerce, one cannot detect whether an organization is a nonprofit-organization (NPOs) as there is no official definition for NPOs. In the scientific literature, the definition of the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project (CNP) has become a standard in comparative literature. Following this definition and the closely related “International Classification of Nonprofit-Organizations” (ICNPO), the Center for Philanthropy Studies (CEPS) has been monitoring the Swiss Nonprofit sector since 2009. Using AI, we aim to reduce manual classification effort in the future.

The Non-Profit Organization classifier (NPO-C) is an AI tool that has been developed at CEPS to classify the non-profit status of a certain organization based on its mission statement. It has been trained using the CEPS Database of Foundations, which has been in continuous development for the past decade; the database contains information about all foundations registered in Swiss Register of Commerce. The database also includes the nonprofit status for every foundation.

Using the known data for more than 20,000 foundations in our database, we developed a highly precise AI model that can detect the non-profit status analyzing the mission statement. The technology behind this AI model is based on deep learning transformer neural network large language models. Moreover, the EasyNMT library was used to translate the mission statements into a single unified language to guarantee coherency in the keywords and ensure a safe model training phase. The translated mission statements are then used to fine-tune a pre-trained RoBERTa-base Large Language model. That will lead to a version of the RoBERTa-base model that is tailored for classifying the non-profit status of any organization based only on the mission statement.

Current status: Under Development

Project team: Omar Hussein, Georg von Schnurbein

Example of a mission statement analysis:

"The purpose of the Foundation is to provide non-profit services to non-profit-making children's and orphanages domiciled in Switzerland, as well as children's hospitals, from their income from the Foundation's assets after deduction of running costs and provisions. The Board of Trustees shall, to the best of its knowledge and conscience, determine the amount of annual Foundation services; the beneficiary homes; the use of the amounts allocated (contributions). The Board of Trustees has the right and the obligation to secure the necessary provisions for a good and solid maintenance of the foundation's property (properties). Existing mortgages on foundation property can be amortised after free decisions of the foundation council. The Foundation pursues neither gainful nor self-help purposes."