The nonprofit sector's increasing size, political relevance, and visibility to social scientists demands data on the sector's scope, characteristics, and trends. National and statewide data initiatives have responded to these needs, but most databases remain problematic, especially at the level of local communities. Knowledge about the sector is therefore likely to be incomplete and/or biased. This article reports on efforts to create and assess a comprehensive non-profit database, using Indiana as a test case. Three institutional databases (IRS registration, state incorporation, and phone listings) were combined and supplemented from local listings in 11 communities. We included an alternative hypernetwork sampling strategy for comparison purposes. The results show major gaps in the Internal Revenue Service and state incorporation databases and a surprisingly small overlap between the two. The databases, and various definitions of the sector, differ in their portrait of the sector, and the profile differences vary from one community to the next.
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