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Fast, free, and available now: Candid's Demographics API

Integrating demographic data into your grants systems is free and reduces burdens on both admins and nonprofits. Discover the power of Candid's Demographics API. Learn about its features, functionality, and benefits in this comprehensive webinar. Recording date: July 13, 2023 Use the following bookmarks to jump to sections of the training: Introduction 0:00:13 About Candid 0:00:48 Demographics via Candid (DvC) 0:02:16 Introducing the speaker 0:02:54 Candid profiles and demographic data collection Candid's Demographics API 0:06:00 What is an API? 0:07:00 Demographics API 0:08:23 Live demo 0:25:30 Visualizing an organization’s demographic data 0:26:55 Visualizing aggregated demographic data 0:27:51 Resources for nonprofits 0:28:43 Resources for API users Next steps 0:29:48 Q&A 0:37:50 Have questions we didn’t get to? 0:38:05 Testing our Demographics API 0:38:51 Become a DvC partner

Candid

7 months ago

Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar. My name is Betty Baffer, senior director of Partnership Operations for Candid. My pronouns are she/hers, and I'm based in Williamsburg, Virginia. We are a nonprofit organization with a mission to get you the information you need to do good. We provide the most comprehensive data and insights of the social sector, Candid was formed in 2019 when GuideStar and Foundation Center merged, Candid combined GuideStar tools on nonprofits
and Foundation Center’s tools on foundations with new resources to offer more comprehensive real time information about the social sector. Our history is steeped in transparency, data and analysis, paired with guidance on how to leverage our tools. One of our priority initiatives as it relates to collecting data is Demographics via Candid, whose core team has organized this webinar. The vision of Demographics via Candid is to reduce the burden on nonprofits by providing a standardized and centr
alized place for sharing demographic data just one time on their Candid profile, where it can be accessed by many. As a grant seeking organization ourselves, we estimate that we are asked close to 100 times a year for demographic information, often in different formats and segmented by different categories. We see Demographics via Candid as a viable solution to stop the duplication of efforts for all nonprofits so we can get back to the missions we signed up to serve. In addition to increasing e
fficiencies by enabling nonprofits to share demographic data just one time through Demographics via Candid, we’ll be able to aggregate data to inform a full view of equity access to the sector, provide benchmarks, identify gaps and track progress, and provide a way to find nonprofits reflective of the communities that they serve. We publicly launched this initiative in February of this year and are heartened by a strong and dedicated group of sector leaders which see the value of this movement t
o create a more effective, efficient and equitable sector. For those of our 93 partners joining us on the call today, we thank you for your partnership in this effort. And now to introduce our speaker for today. We are super fortunate to have with us Hannah Oren. Hannah is a Candid Solutions engineer and works closely with API users. She creates product demos, technical documentation, and onboarding materials to guide customers as they use Candid’s APIs. Previously, she was part of Candid’s Data
Services team, building custom data sets, and developing a deep knowledge of nonprofit data. Hannah holds a BBA in business analytics from the College of William and Mary. Thank you, Hannah, for sharing your expertise with us today. Thanks, Betty. It's great to be here. So before we dive into the demo of the Demographics API, let's sort of back out a little bit and talk more about the Candid profiles. So as Betty shared, the Candid profiles are a way for nonprofits to share information about th
emselves and make that publicly available throughout the sector. So one of the pieces of information we collect on those Candid profiles is demographics. And again, our mission is to have nonprofits come to these profiles, clean them, update them with information, and be able to share this data one time and have that flow throughout the philanthropic sector. Like I mentioned, part of the data that we collect on these profiles is demographic data. So as to be more specific, we are collecting data
for the categories of race & ethnicity, gender identity, transgender identity, sexual orientation and disability status. And we're collecting all of those types of information for the staffing levels of leader and co-leader, board members, senior staff, and staff at nonprofit. So to dive into a little bit of what the form looks like when a nonprofit comes to their Candid profile and shares this information, and you can see on the left hand side of the screen the form to collect information abou
t a leader’s race and ethnicity. So for the leader and a co-leader of an organization, we collect that information at an individual level. So you can see there are individual radio buttons to select race ethnicity options for that individual. However, for the board members, staff, and senior staff, we're collecting that information in aggregate. So you can see what that form looks like to enter in that information on the right hand side. That form is looking at the gender identity for the board
members specifically. So you can see that the input for that information is entering the number of individuals within that group that identify with each subcategory listed. So in this instance, this organization has eight board members who identify as female, seven who identify as male, one who declined to state, and then one unknown. So you can see that that unknown option is included for the aggregated numbers for board, staff, and senior staff, because we are checking to make sure that all of
the numbers add up. So you can see there at the bottom that we are just confirming that they have previously told us they have 17 board members and they've entered an identity for all of them. And so we are doing that validation on our end just to make sure that the data quality coming across is all in good order. And you'll also notice that there are “decline to state” options on both the individual and aggregate data collection for those individuals who may not feel comfortable sharing this t
ype of information. So once a nonprofit has come to Candid and shared this information, how do you access it? We are really excited to share that we have recently launched our new Demographics API that makes this data publicly available in the tools you're already using. It was great to see that so many of you already know what it is, but for that portion of you who doesn't know what an API is, API is an acronym that stands for application programing interface. That might sound like a lot of tec
hnical jargon, but at its core, an API is just a way for two software applications to talk to each other. So you may not know you used an API, but they're actually backing up a lot of systems and tools you probably have used. So for example, Candid’s APIs are used by tools like Flux and Foundant to return data on nonprofits. And APIs are used in lots of other tools around the world that you might interact with. And in the case of Demographics API, we're hoping that this allows you to pull in the
demographics data to the tools you're already using and the workflows you're already going through so that you don't have to leave those tools and go to a secondary application to be able to complete your processes. So to dive into more of the specifics about the demographics API, the Demographics API is a free product that allows you to access this demographics information in real time. So our hope is that you can use this to streamline the grant application for nonprofits by automatically pul
ling in that demographics information while they're filling out the grant application rather than having them have to complete this information repeatedly and in different formats as they're completing these applications. And we also hope that you can use this to update your nonprofit records, and so you can pull in the latest and greatest demographics information and then use that to do reporting on the composition of your grant making portfolio or individual programs. You can see on the right
here some of the-- a snippet of the demographics API return. And we're actually going to dive into a live demo of the API itself and walk through the full return in detail. I will note that this isn't what an end user of the API would likely see. This is the underlying data that you would have a team of developers incorporate into the tools you're already using. So it has some sort of user interface built on top of it to essentially display this in a more user friendly way in the tool that you'r
e using. So I'm going to exit out of the slide deck and we are going to hop on over into a tool called Postman. So what this will do is this will allow us to demonstrate making a call to the API. So again, if you're not as technical, this might look a little overwhelming, but we'll walk through it step by step. So the anatomy of an API call is you need to specify what type of call it is. So in this case, you can see here we're specifying that it's a get call. All we want to do is return data and
get it back. The next thing we'll specify is the URL of the API. So all of Candid’s APIs start the same with api.candid.org. We’ll also need to specify which API we're calling. As you can see here, we’re putting demographics and we're calling version 1. The API-- The demographics API returns information for one organization at a time and that's based on EIN. So we'll also need to provide EIN for the organization we're interested in returning data on. So once we do this, the last piece that you
need to make a successful API call is a subscription key. I'm not going to display mine for obvious reasons, but we'll talk later in the webinar about how you can get access to a subscription here to try out this API for yourself. So since we have all of the information we need, I'm going to go ahead and hit send on this call and that's going to contact Candid’s servers and return it with the demographics API response. So this is quite a lot of data, but we'll walk through it again step by step.
The first thing that we'll see is this meta data here at the top. That's just some information about the API request itself. So in this case we can see that the request was processed successfully, which is exactly what we want. Moving down into the actual data itself, you can see that the first part of the return is the summary section. So the summary section of the API contains basic information about the organization itself, the name, the EIN, the city, and the state. This is just to ensure t
hat this is in fact the correct organization you were looking for and provide enough information to do that verification. The next two fields you can see here are demographics, status and demographic status, non profit. These are essentially two variations of the same information that is providing information on whether or not this organization has come to Candid and shared demographics data on their profile. You can see in this case, this organization has and the demographic status message is r
eturning, this organization has provided Candid demographics data and also the date on which they provided it. So, for this organization they last updated this data in May. You'll notice that the demographic status nonprofit message is just a slight variation on that first one that we saw. So this first message is meant to be shown to a funder or someone who's not with this specific nonprofit that we just returned data for. And so it can provide a little bit more information about whether you mi
ght want to encourage this nonprofit to go back to Candid and share this data. In the demographic status nonprofit message, you can see that the way this is phrased, it's meant to be displayed directly to the nonprofit whose record we're looking at. So, for instance, if they were coming to fill out their grant application, you could display this to them to provide you with information about when they last updated this data and if they hadn't shared this information with Candid at all this messag
e would provide some guidance on how they could go about sharing that. And we'll look at an example of that as well. And then finally, the last field in the summary section is this date last modified. So you can see this will echo what we saw in the two status messages and it's just saying that they had last changed this data on May 4th of this year. If for some reason you weren't looking at a nonprofit's record and you notice that the date last modified is not recent enough to really meet your
needs so say they're filling out a grant application and they haven't updated this data with Candid for several years. That's another situation where we would encourage you to ask them to go back to Candid and update this data, and then that data would be available to you in the API and other funders or other people using Candid's resources. So moving on from the summary section, the next thing we'll get into is the demographic data itself. So the first bit of this demographic section is the sta
ck level totals. So you can see here we're collecting the total board members, staff, and senior staff at this organization. As I mentioned, we do use these to validate that the individual identity counts that they enter add up to the total. So they said they had 17 board members making sure they've accounted for all 17 those in their data entry for any users of the API. These can actually be used to display this information as a percentage rather than a raw number. So you could use the data for
each individual category, of demographic identity and use these total numbers as the denominator and display those counts as a percentage rather than just the raw numbers depending on what is most useful for your use case. Moving on to the categories information. This is where we're going to get into the nuts and bolts of the demographics itself. So you can see that we're going to look first at the race and ethnicity information. So each different category or type of demographic information tha
t is being collected will be listed as a separate category here in the API return. So in this case, we're looking at race and ethnicity data. Perfect. Now we're up close and personal with this data. So taking a look at the race and ethnicity data. The first three fields we're looking at are going to be board members not collected, senior staff staff not collected, rather, and senior staff not collected. And so these are true/false fields. And if any of them are true, it just indicates that this
organization doesn't collect this type of information for that specific group of people. So in this case, they're all false. But for example, if board members not collected was true, that would indicate that this organization doesn't collect race and ethnicity data for its board. Moving on to the subcategories. This is where various responses for each type of demographic information will be displayed. So you can see here the first subcategory is Asian or Asian-American. In this, you can see it's
going to mirror the collection framework that we showed previously. So for board members, staff, and senior staff, that will be returned as the aggregate number of members of that group who identify with this subcategory. So in this case, this organization has one board member, 26 staff, and 4 senior staff who identify as Asian or Asian-American. You can also see that there are two additional fields within this object. The first is reported by CEO. And this indicates whether or not the leader o
f the organization identifies with this subcategory. These are true/false fields. So in this case, you can see this is true because this organization's leader does identify as Asian or Asian-American. The same thing is true of the reported by co-CEO fields. That is looking at information for the leader and will also be a true or false field. Obviously, not all organizations will have co-leaders, so if they don't, this field isn't applicable and will be returned as null, which you can see here. S
o if we scroll down, you can see additional objects with the same structure for each of the various responses for this category. So we'll see Black and African-American, Hispanic, Latino, Latina, and Latinx and so on and so forth for each of the responses for race and ethnicity. If we continue scrolling down, we can see there are quite a lot of these responses. We'll get to the next category. This next category is race and ethnicity other. So this category specifically represents those write-in
responses for people who prefer to identify with a race or ethnicity that is not listed in our options. So for each of those that's entered that will be populated here as an additional subcategory here. And you can see that they've just chosen to write in "other" as a response. And there is one board member who identifies that way. The structure would be the same here with the CEO/co-CEO fields being true or false, depending on whether those individuals identify with this subcategory. If we scro
ll down, you can see that the structure continues. So we'll have categories for gender identity. With those various responses. Gender identity 2, which is the-- how it's being returned here for transgender identity, which we previously mentioned. And then sexual orientation and the various responses there. And then finally, disability status. So if we scroll down all the way to the bottom, that concludes the return of the API. So it's really just the summary information. And then all of the vari
ous demographics. Obviously, this is an organization that's filled out very complete information. So let's take a look next at an organization that actually hasn't provided any demographics data. to Candid. So we'll hop over here, this should look pretty familiar. It'll be mostly the same as the first request, but obviously with a different EIN to call a record for a different organization. So you can see I'm going to go ahead and hit send on this request and you can see that while we've got a 2
00 and our request was successfully processed, the return for this API is a lot shorter. And if we look down here at the demographic status message, we can see that this organization hasn't provided Candid with any demographics data. You can also see here, what I was previously mentioning where there is some text about encouraging a nonprofit to complete their Candid profile and providing them with the resource to do so. And then you can also see that the demographics status nonprofit message co
uld be displayed to this organization to redirect them back to Candid to share this data. So, say this organization had come into your foundation and was filling out a grant application and you tried to populate their demographic data and run into this status message. Your organization has not provided Candid with demographics data. We're going to walk through next what it would look like for that organization to go to Candid, update that information and then how it would be available for you in
the API in almost real time. So you can see here we provided a URL to access the interface to go ahead and update their nonprofit profile on Candid. So I already have this open in a web browser, so we'll navigate over there next. So this is the interface to update a nonprofit profile. Again, this can be accessed through that link or just on GuideStar.org. I'll also note that there is a potential additional step if a nonprofit has never come in to update their nonprofit profile on Candid, we do
have a claims process that just ensures that that individual who's coming in to claim that nonprofit profile and update it, is in fact affiliated with that organization and is authorized to be updating and sharing data on behalf of them. In this case, I'm already authorized and approved as a manager of this profile for the organization that we were previously looking at. So I'm going to go ahead and select edit here. You can see this is this same EIN we were just looking at so we will hit edit a
nd you can see here that there is quite a lot of information that a nonprofit could share on their Candid profile. In this case, we're just going to focus on updating the leader demographics. Again, if you were directing this organization to come in and fill out their demographics information, you could encourage them to complete as much as you wanted. You can see here we have leader demographics, board, senior staff, and staff. So in this case, just for the sake of time, let's navigate to leade
r demographics in the gold section. So you can see here there's some information about the Demographics via Candid campaign that we talked about earlier, as well as a "how to" guide that provides some information on how a nonprofit could go about collecting this information from their board or staff if they don't already. If we scroll down, this form might look familiar. So this is the interface where you can enter in your leader's race and ethnicity. So we are going to go ahead and complete thi
s section. I will select White/Caucasian/European, for this race and ethnicity category female and cisgender for gender identity, heterosexual or straight for sexual orientation, and finally, person without a disability. And just like that, our leader demographic information is complete. So you can see here at the bottom, there are a couple of different options for where to go next. We could continue on to the board member demographics, which again would be helpful if the organization needed to
share all of this various information on their Candid profile. We can also continue on to platinum, which would provide the organization with an opportunity to share additional information about their nonprofit. What we're going to select is go ahead and continue on to publish. If we hit publish, we'll just need to confirm on this page and agree to all the program terms and then hit publish now. So this will take a second. It's already gone through and our updates have been published successfull
y. So these will appear on the organization's profile on Guidestar.org and then they will also be accessible in the API. So again, in our scenario of this organization coming to your foundation to fill out a grant application, if they had gone to complete this information, it would now be available to you all in the API. So let's head on back to Postman and call the API for this organization again and we should see the demographics data appear here. So this is that same request for that same org
anization. And I'll go ahead and hit send. And you can see now the return looks a little bit different. So you can see that the demographic status message is now saying that this organization has provided Candid demographics data and is reflective of today's date. And if we scroll down, we should see for these categories that we've selected now, the reported by CEO field is true. So we can see this is the White/Caucasian/ European category that we had selected that is now being reported as true
for the leader. If we continue down to gender identity, we can see Female is true. For gender identity, True-- cisgender. We're not transgender. It's true. And then heterosexual or straight for the gender identity-- or for the sexual orientation rather, and then person without a disability. And so if you were utilizing this API, you could immediately call it up when this organization updated this data, and it would be available to you. So let's talk now, now that we've looked at the data, kind o
f popped the hood, let's talk now about how you might actually go about utilizing this data or displaying it to your users, integrating into your systems. So I'm going to go ahead and hop back into the slide deck and we'll talk about a couple of options. So we've had a number of users who opted to display this data visually because it is fairly complex. There's lots of categories and subcategories. They found this to be a helpful way to make sense of this information. So this is actually what we
're looking at is all this data is displayed on an organization's Candid profile. So you can see that for board members, staff, and senior staff we're displaying the breakdown of the various identities as different colored bar charts. This is a static image that if you were on the live site and hovered over any one of these individual colored bars, the percentage of individuals that identify with that category would be would display. You can also see that we are breaking out the leadership infor
mation, which is that inset in the bottom right corner. And you can also imagine that now that you've seen kind of under the hood and the nuts and bolts of the API that all of these various categories are being returned because that reported by CEO field is true. So you can imagine that these are just the category names for the subcategory names rather, being displayed for this organization's leader. So again, this is just a jumping off point, but this is how this organization or an organization
would show up on their Candid profile. And for a group of organizations. What we're looking at right now is actually a publicly available Tableau dashboard, for the Demographics via Candid campaign and I believe my colleagues will share the link to this chart so you can take a look at it yourself. But what this does is it displays information for a group of nonprofits. So right now we're looking at the race and ethnicity data. And you can see that for each of the various staff or board position
s, those are broken out and then the identities within that category are displayed as, again, those color bar charts with the number of folks who identify with them displayed as well. Again, just a jumping off point, but we've had folks find this helpful to envision how their organization might incorporate this data into the tools that they use. We also recognize that for actual nonprofits, this process isn't quite as easy as just hitting that publish button. So as Candid, we do provide a number
of resources for nonprofits, so our Candid learning community makes available a number of resources on the benefits of sharing demographic data and how they can get started doing that. We also provide help guides out on how to start collecting that data and a sample survey and then we provide some FAQs on how a nonprofit can logistically go about claiming their Candid profile and filling out that section. We also have a nonprofit support team who's on hand to respond to any questions or stumbli
ng blocks nonprofits may hit as they complete this process of claiming their profile and updating this information. And last but certainly not least, we also make available resources for our API users. So we have a robust developer portal that's hosted at developer.candid.org And this has resources for the Demographics API specifically in addition to all of our other Candid APIs so you'll find user guides on organizational demographic data, demographic data for grant making, as well as our API s
pecification, which provides all the details of the API return, possible responses, things of that nature. And finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention our wonderful API support team who is also on hand to answer any API-specific questions that you might encounter as you use this product and you can access them or get in touch with them also on our developer portal. And with that, that concludes our demo at the API. So Betty, I will turn it back over to you. Great. Hannah, thank you so muc
h. We had some great questions coming in while you were you talking and our our colleagues have been answering them, but there's a couple more that are out here. And so let's you and I try to tackle a few of them together. Thanks so much for that demo. All right. So let's see. Here's one. One question is, are nonprofits sharing both or both their own demographic information, staff, board, etc.? And also the demographic info on those they serve? I'll try this one, Hannah, so I, I think they're ta
lking about the population served, which we at Candid call the PCS code. That data doesn't give the detailed demographics like the demographics that we have on on organizations, staff and board and leadership. But it does give some level of of information on the population that served. Sort of affiliated, question: Will the demographics API eventually include population served or the PCS or will that continue to be only available through the Premier API? I was wondering, Hannah, if you happen to
know that-- the answer to that question. So it's not currently on our road map to add those population served to the demographics API specifically as this person is well aware of, those are available in the Premier API. I think that is something we may consider for future future versions of the demographics API. Great. Great. Shifting gears a little bit, I saw there was a question about grants management vendors and which of those systems have been integrating or committed to integrating with o
ur demographic, with that demographic data. So the answer to that, there's six currently, but we're in conversations with with a lot of others. If you-- if you're someone out there that's using a grants management system that is not currently integrating Candid's data, just feel free to reach out to them and we would love to talk to them. We we would love to get all the systems on board. Currently we have, well, what looks like over 50% of the the market and we'd like to get to 100%. So always h
appy to talk to grants management systems that are interested in integrating and it's free for them as well. Let's see, there's a question, Is the data queried only once or is it updated with some frequency? I think Hannah answered that the the API pulls real time data, so that's as the data is entered, basically it's available to folks through the API. In terms of people entering the data, the organizations entering data Candid encourages at least annual cadence of entering the data, but someti
mes the data can get a little old. So anything you can do to help encourage organizations to update that data in real time would be great as well as at least once a year. And here's one for you, Hannah. How much coding experience would an organization need to embed need to embed the API? Is the API integration a plug and play, or will it require more technical expertise? So in general, integrating the API will require some level of technical expertise. An exception to that would be working with
someone who, like a consultant, who has experience or has developed some sort of connector for this. And the other option would be if a grants management system that you use, has already integrated the demographics API into their tool. You could just use whatever add on or modular widget that they have added this data to. So it depends. Great. Yeah. And we also-- you mentioned the other ways that you can get the demographic data. If you don't have the technical expertise on staff, you can get it
through a flat file that's available and also through our our dashboard or-- Sorry, is that what we're calling it now? The Demographics via Candid dashboard. The Demographics via Candid dashboard. Yeah. And I think we provided the link too. Great. So... and then here's a question. Has Candid thought about providing nonprofits a data collection template that matches the GuideStar structure to use as a tool to survey their staffs and boards on Microsoft Forms, for example? I have great news. Yes,
we have. We've been testing a Google form and we are ready to, It's still in beta, so we would love to provide that link, be in touch with us on that or we'll be in touch with you to provide that link. And then we would love to get some feedback on how that works for you because we want to make it much easier for organizations to-- to get this information from their their organization and be able to provide it to us at one time. The, Hannah, this might be one for you any plans to publish a be--
a power BI connector? No plans currently, it's not on any of our roadmaps. I will say if you're looking for data visualization for that Demographics via Candid Tableau dashboard Um, and Betty I wanted to respond to one question I did see asking if the date that an organization submitted that data is provided out in the API. So that field is the date last modified and it is included in the API both as a standalone field and then in those demographic status messages. So you can pull that data and
decide if that's recent enough for your needs. And again, if that organization hasn't shared that data or updated it in a while, we encourage you to send them right on back to Candid to provide more recent data. Great. Let's see. Here's one. What would be the cadence for updating data? Since each organization has differing fiscal years, the Candid profile is available year round for organizations to enter their data as it works for them. And they can-- they are inputting their own fiscal years
into the data, so you'll be able to see what year the data is appropriate for when when you look at their profile, I see some more grants management some more grants management questions-- Are the GMS vendors listed currently integrating with the API or are there any GMS set up already actually integrated and available for their users now? There-- the six that we listed have committed to integrating the data and each of them are on a different path for making that ready for market. So I would e
ncourage you to just reach out to to your grants management vendor and ask them. Similarly there was a question about Foundant specifically for grants management. Yes, just let them know that you're interested in the data and they can take it from there. If you are receiving the demographic data through your grants management system, it probably is not necessary for you to connect with Candid directly. You can get it through your grants management system. You would not have to use this free demo
graphic API. Oh, this is a great question and it kind of will bring us to our next part of the presentation. It's how can I access a demographics API? So let's go ahead and have that be the last question, because I think we have an answer for that. Soon, we'll start to wrap up Also, if you have questions that we didn't get to, please send us an email at partnerships@candid.org and someone from our team will get back with you on that. All right so Next steps. So how to get access to-- so to test
our demographic API and see if it's right for your organization, what we do is go to the API section of our website And if you scroll down, it's like the "get access" button. You'll receive a free 30 day trial to all of Candid's APIs, including the demographic API, and that gives your organization the opportunity to test and to see if this is a solution that's right for your organization. During the course of your trial, you'll be prompted for next steps. So during the course of those 30 days, y
ou'll get a prompt to to have you go to the next step, which is to get access to the production version of the API. So that's basically the the next steps on how you would get access. Also for those of you who are funders and member organizations and you're already collecting or thinking about collecting demographic data from your nonprofit community, we'd like to ask you to please consider becoming a Demographics via Candid partner. Our ask is straightforward. It's that you ask your nonprofit p
artners and members to submit their demographic data via the Candid profile and only through the profile to achieve that vision of just asking for it one time. So we support our partners that join with us by providing communication tool kits for your outreach. And we also provide programing support to help nonprofits claim their profile and enter their demographics. Thank you for joining us. Never hesitate to contact us at partnerships@candid.org. Thank you.

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