The data used to report this story was pulled from the most recent digitally available 990 filings for nonprofit organizations based in Omaha, using ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer tool. In most cases, those filings were from fiscal year 2023 or 2022, but some were from earlier. Because of this, some people may have left or joined organizations since their membership was reported and the data was collected. Many people in the dataset also serve on additional nonprofit boards not based in Omaha, corporate boards, or committees.
We collected data from active organizations with more than $250,000 reported in revenue on their most recent filing. In total, more than 600 Omaha nonprofits are represented in the data. Some smaller or newer organizations may not be included. Some organizations may have ceased operating since the data was collected.
From 990 form Part VII, Section A of each of the 603 nonprofits, we collected the names of all board members and the CEO or executive director. We programmatically cleaned up spelling, punctuation and capitalization across the data. Then, we standardized the names with known nicknames and first or middle initials and searched for people who appear on multiple boards.
Some boards are nearly the same because of shared parent organizations, like the various Nebraska Medicine affiliated nonprofits or the Visiting Nurse Health Services and Visiting Nurse Foundation. We combined and condensed those organizations by hand to develop a list of 150 people who serve on three or more unique nonprofit boards.
With that list of 150 people, we used publicly available information from a variety of sources including Linkedin profiles, website bios, news articles, college rosters and voter rolls to determine each person’s gender, age range, job title, company, highest level of education and alma mater. We did not include race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or disability because few people publicly self-identified with those demographic groups.
We used that information to generate demographic statistics, and brought those statistics to multiple nonprofit researchers for review, who agreed that they reflected findings of similar research. Here are some top-line findings:
- 62% are men
- The median age is 58 years old
- At least 92% have some college degree
- 53% attended a school in Nebraska for at least one of those degrees
- 48% hold a C-Suite level executive title
- Finance, health care and philanthropy are the most common job sectors
Explore the full data table:
