Suggestion of an Organization subtype for non-profit / not-for-profit

[danbri]

http://schema.org/Organization

Migrating in from https://www.w3.org/2011/webschema/track/issues/23

    "Julie Setbon asks, "Under http://schema.org/Organization what would a non-profit group fall under ? An NGO is a non-governmental organization which to me is not the same as an independent 503 tax exempt or other non-profit grass roots movement." 

[vholland]

The previous discussion did not raise the issue that non-profit is usually a legal/tax status granted by a government agency and therefore non-profit status can differ from country to country even for the same organization.

It seems like it would be best to have a link between:

• Government body which determines non-profit status (differs country to country)
• Designation (See 501(c) in USA.)
• The organization being designated as a non-profit
• perhaps grant date and revocation date

[wqkeenan]

Numerous types of non-profit organizations are not covered by organization subtype such as Trade Organization, User Group, Standards Committee, Community Association, Co-op, Hobby or Special Interest Club (like chess club or book club), Religious Group, Fraternal Organization, Youth Group, Historical Society, etc. All of these can be grouped under charity or non-profit to keep it simple and generic.

[mfhepp]

@wqkeenan

1. Please keep in mind that you can always use the generic super-types if schema.org does not provide a specific sub-type. The sub-types of schema.org don't have to be exhaustive, as long as the consumers of the schema.org data have other cues (e.g. names + labels) to understand the exact nature of the thing, or if the difference don't matter for the typical processing. There are many distinctions that we thing are relevant, but they do not have to go into schema.org as long as there is no difference for the processing of the data.
2. I am against adding as super-type distinction that introduces a new axis which may not always hold. There may well be for-profit book clubs etc. The for-profit vs. non-profit distinction is conceptually orthogonal to the main activities of an organization.

[mfhepp]

@vholland is right when stressing that the tax/legal status is country specific. So a simple property will not work. Also, there are different levels and sources of categories for charities / non-profit organizations, e.g. 501(c) and its 29 subtypes in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)_organization).

We could add a property "taxExemptStatus" with a range of Text OR schema:TaxExemptDetails, which would have

taxExemptType Text OR QualitativeValue
eligibleCountry Text OR ItemList
validFrom
validThrough

But I think that would be overkill.

[vivalasmecca]

I know this is an old thread, but I feel this one too — and for me, it's less about the tax status and more about the structure of our information. Our nonprofit's projects / programs are not products, creative works, local businesses, recipes, or blog articles — basic concepts that are easily covered in the currenct specification. Our organization has projects/programs, with attributes like "beneficiaries", "scope", "locale", etc. I think this applies structurally to many other nonprofits, and it would be a welcome add to the system.

[ghost]

Totally agree with vivalasmecca. I’m actually so surprised that non-profits aren’t even a schema Type while there’s much more specific types already in other extensions, medical extensions have infectious diseases and there’s no non-profit schema type yet?

What the previous user said is so spot on, it’s hard to express anything about your non-profit besides the generic organization fields, since most non-profits aren’t posting recipes and creative works lol.

[thadguidry]

I'd like to see some folks on this issue to try to come up with useful properties and descriptions of those properties of a proposed NonProfitOrganization type. We don't have anyone doing the initial 1st pass of that.

@vivalasmecca @kesenwang tell us more about your structure, or more importantly the structured data that you would want to expose...what does it look like? What do the relationships look like for beneficiaries, scope, locale (what does that even mean). Type it up in a online draft document that you can share, so we can all review and start somewhere. I.E. You First :-)

[pierreozoux]

I propose the following:

We could add these organisation type:

• informalOrganisation : an organisation without legal form
• association
• foundation
• cooperative

These definitions depends strongly on the country. To be sure that we understand which kind, we could add:

• organisationLegalForm: URL to the law describing the legal form in your country.

About for profit vs non profit:

• a corporation is by definition for profit
• a cooperative gives dividends to there share holders
• associations like FIFA gives enormous salaries
  From my perspective, the only way we can resolve that is to use the legal definition. In France, you can request tax exemption for your donators, in that case it is easy to say that these associations are non profit.
  Maybe we should divide the discussion about organisation type and profit structure?
  I'll try to PR with organisation type, this is what I need for https://libreho.st/directory.json

[jennet]

For me it's probably less about new objects in schema.org, but perhaps more documentation around best practise of presenting information.

As @pierreozoux mentioned, as the definitions depend so much on the country, perhaps rather than having a number of sub-types, the superType Organization can have a article/url property legalForm (as suggested above).

After that, I would like more documentation about how I connect Service / ServiceChannel to an Organization (is it through OfferCatalog ?) so that I can make use of the OpenEligibility Taxonomy to describe a list of services and their areaServed to define the boundaries of the service offerings. (others may choose different taxonomies to describe services, as much as I'd like an accepted taxonomy around services I think that's a whoooole other thread :) )

An example in the docs on the Organization page would then really help embed best practise! (note: the example wouldn't need to favour any one taxonomy for describing services)

@thadguidry sorry that's not the online doc you were asking for :) but my suggestion is less about new stuff and more about connecting up what we already have (aside from the legalForm property)

[ldexterldesign]

👋 https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/2577

[ldexterldesign]

I am against adding as super-type distinction that introduces a new axis which may not always hold. There may well be for-profit book clubs etc. The for-profit vs. non-profit distinction is conceptually orthogonal to the main activities of an organization.

👍

[vholland]

schema.org/nonProfitStatus was added in schema.org 8.0. I'll close this and the issue #2577 can be discussed there.