Nonprofit and education are two of the most financially transparent sectors in the country. That should make selling into them easier. Should.
Every tax-exempt organization files a public annual return with the IRS. Every college that participates in federal student aid reports enrollment, finance, staffing, and outcomes to the federal government. The data is public, structured, and unusually complete.
That is the trap in this market. The data is already heavily mined, but mostly for the wrong motion. The donor-prospect-research industry uses filings, wealth markers, foundation giving, and board relationships to find donors.
But nobody is reading those same filings, trying to find institutions in operational or financial pain to sell software and services to. The opportunity is huge.
This is your guide to breaking it open.
The Inventory
We’ve ranked these public data sources by how much of an edge they give you over every other vendor fighting for attention in your prospect’s inbox.
IRS Form 990 and the EO Business Master File (projects.propublica.org/nonprofits)
Every tax-exempt organization in the US files an annual information return with the IRS: for most organizations, it’s the Form 990. Smaller orgs may file Form 990-EZ and then Form 990-PF for private foundations. About 1.8 million organizations reside in this universe, keyed by EIN and classified in the Exempt Organizations Business Master File. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer makes the filings searchable and exposes a clean API on top of the IRS’s bulk XML. This is your financial X-ray of the entire nonprofit sector. For each organization, you get:
Revenue, expenses, and net assets (with year-over-year trends readable across filings)
Program-service revenue breakdown and grant-dependence percentage
Compensation for executives and key staff, plus names and titles
Named officers, directors, and board members
Governance answers: audits conducted, conflicts of interest, and board oversight structure
Foundation grants paid with recipient names and amounts (990-PF)
The officer and compensation data are often underappreciated. The 990 is the only source in the sector that gives you named decision-makers, their titles, and their pay in a single free filing. Before going about buying a contact list, check here first.
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer · ProPublica API · IRS EO BMF · IRS Tax-Exempt Organization Search
IPEDS (nces.ed.gov/ipeds)
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System collects mandatory annual data from every college, university, and vocational institution that participates in federal student aid. It covers roughly 7,000 institutions, with downloadable data going back decades. It is publicly and freely available data, updated annually, with built-in peer comparisons. Specific fields include:
Fall and 12-month enrollment by level, status, race, and gender
Institutional finance: revenues by source, expenses by function, endowment value
Completions by program and award level
Human resources data, like staffing counts by type and function
Student financial aid: count and amount by program
Graduation and transfer-out rates
Admissions rates and test-score ranges
The finance-and-enrollment combination is the recipe base for most of what follows. Three years of enrollment decline, high tuition dependence, and thin reserves is not a research note. It is a sales trigger. No call is needed to establish the problem. The data is already there.
IPEDS Use the Data · IPEDS Data Center
Federal Student Aid Financial Flags (studentaid.gov/data-center/school)
The Department of Education publishes three financial-oversight signals for higher-education institutions: the financial-responsibility composite score, the Heightened Cash Monitoring list, and the cohort default rate.
A school on the Heightened Cash Monitoring list has been flagged by the federal government for financial or compliance concerns. Sometimes this requires a letter of credit before they can receive federal aid. That is a public, dated, forced-action distress signal. Fields include:
Financial-responsibility composite score (below 1.5 triggers heightened scrutiny)
Heightened Cash Monitoring tier: HCM1 or HCM2, with HCM2 the more severe designation
Cohort default rate by year
A school on HCM2 is not a prospect that might have a problem. The Department of Education has already made that case, in writing, with oversight conditions attached. This is the higher-ed cousin of an OSHA consent order or a bank enforcement action.
Federal Student Aid Data Center
Single Audits — Federal Audit Clearinghouse (fac.gov)
Any organization that spends $750,000 or more in federal funds in a year must file a single audit. The findings are public: material weaknesses, significant deficiencies, questioned costs, and the federal programs involved. The Federal Audit Clearinghouse holds filings from fiscal year 2015 forward, with ProPublica linking many of them.
A finding tells you exactly what broke, where it broke, and whether it was fixed last year. Per filing:
Auditee name, EIN, and fiscal year
Federal programs audited and dollar amounts
Findings: material weaknesses, significant deficiencies, or qualified opinions
Questioned costs with amounts
Prior-year findings showing whether the same problems appeared before
That last column is the sharpest cut in the dataset. If the same material weakness appeared in the prior year, the organization has not fixed it. That is not just pain. That is pain with a documented failure to remediate, a new audit window approaching, and a federal program relationship at risk. Anyone selling grant management, financial controls, or compliance remediation should be monitoring the clearinghouse.
NCES Common Core of Data and F-33 Survey (nces.ed.gov/ccd)
The Common Core of Data covers every public school and district in the country. The Census F-33 survey adds per-pupil revenues and expenditures by district. This is the K-12 universe, with finance and staffing attached, and should serve as the foundation for any district-level targeting. The data set includes:
District and school enrollment by grade, race, and gender
Staff counts: teachers, administrators, instructional aides
Locale type: city, suburban, town, or rural
Per-pupil revenues by source: local, state, and federal
Per-pupil expenditures by function: instruction, administration, support services
The per-pupil expenditure breakdown by function is the one to watch. A district with flat instructional spending and rising administrative costs is not the same prospect as one losing federal revenue. That is a finance conversation dressed as a budget line, and it is publicly reported annually.
College Scorecard (collegescorecard.ed.gov/data)
College Scorecard adds outcome and debt data that IPEDS does not carry: graduate earnings, federal loan amounts, and debt-to-earnings comparisons, built from IPEDS, federal aid records, and IRS tax data. Free download and API. Fields include:
Median earnings at one, five, and ten years post-enrollment, by program
Median federal loan amounts and monthly payments
Earnings relative to high school graduates
Program-level outcomes in more recent Scorecard releases
The GTM angle: any vendor making a value or ROI argument to enrollment management, student-success, or career-services teams now has a public data point for that argument, per institution, per program, before the first call. Scorecard turns “we help improve outcomes” into “your graduates in this program are earning X, against a peer median of Y.”
Federal and Foundation Grant Data (usaspending.gov / candid.org)
Federal grant awards via USAspending and Grants.gov; foundation grantmaking via Candid and 990-PF filings. Together, they reveal who just won funding and whose funding is about to end.
A grant landing is a moment of scaling. A grant ending is a funding cliff. Both are temporal triggers that are readable in advance, from public data, before the organization has communicated any of them to the market. Fields across sources include:
Awarding agency and program name
Recipient name, EIN, and address
Award amount and period of performance (start and end dates)
Place of performance
Foundation grants: recipient, purpose, amount, and year (from 990-PF)
The period-of-performance end date is the signal most teams miss. A major federal grant ending in seven months at an organization where that revenue represents 40% of the budget is not a future problem. It is a current decision window. Grant dependence is readable from the 990. The end date is in USAspending. Crossing them is the recipe.
USAspending · Grants.gov · Candid
State Charity Registration and AG Filings
Most states require charitable organizations to register annually and renew their registrations, and state attorneys general's offices publish enforcement actions and lapsed registrations. Each state maintains its own portal. A lapsed registration is a compliance signal. An AG enforcement action is louder. Fields vary by state but typically include:
Organization name, EIN, and address
Registration status and expiration
Enforcement actions and findings where published
Vendors with strong state-specific coverage or a compliance-oriented product have an information edge that no one else is competing for, because no one wants to do the grunt work of assembling the data sets.
IPEDS Human Resources Data and Job Postings (nces.ed.gov/ipeds)
IPEDS staffing data shows the count and type of employees per institution over time. Year-over-year trends surface layoffs, hiring freezes, and staff transitions before any press release appears. Job postings add the real-time, unstructured layer on top. You should be extracting:
Role, location, and posted date
Full description text: tools named, pain language used, certifications required
Posting velocity over time, i.e., how fast the institution is adding or contracting headcount in a given function
Posting velocity is the signal inside the signal. A single admissions coordinator posting is noise. Four enrollment-marketing postings across twelve weeks at a college with a three-year declining cohort is a pattern. That pattern is a trigger.
MSRB EMMA Database of Municipal Bond Disclosures (emma.msrb.org)
Public colleges, many K-12 districts, and nonprofit hospitals that issue municipal bonds must file continuing disclosures on EMMA, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s Electronic Municipal Market Access system, including financial statements, material event notices, and rating changes.
The 990 does not apply to public districts and state colleges because they are government entities, not tax-exempt organizations. EMMA does. Fields include:
Issuer name and bond series
Official statements and annual financial disclosures
Material event notices: rating changes, payment defaults, covenant violations
Continuing disclosure filings with financials attached
A note on 2026 availability. Federal education data programs have undergone restructuring, and the continuity of some NCES and Department of Education datasets is in flux. The IRS 990 data, the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, and USAspending are on firmer footing. Before building a workflow around a specific federal education dataset, confirm current availability.
The Nonprofit and Education Data Cookbook
Five recipes, ranked by the asymmetry they create. Both sectors, tagged. The data is mostly free. The combination is the work.
Grab the whisk.
Recipe 1: The Enrollment Cliff [Higher Ed]
The Dish: A tuition-dependent college where enrollment has been falling for years and the financial consequences are now visible in the public filings.
Ingredients: IPEDS enrollment (3+ year undergraduate decline) + IPEDS finance (tuition as a percentage of total revenue above 75%, thin operating reserves) + optional garnish: a job posting for enrollment marketing or a hiring freeze across administrative roles in the same window.
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