What do Nonprofits Need Most? Expertise.

The JPMorgan Chase Institute is a global think-tank dedicated to delivering expert insights in data-rich analysis for the public good. It is dedicated to the next frontier of economic research, which really starts with the platform that is JPMorgan Chase; the vast number of touch pointsit has on the world economy--customers, businesses, governments, markets; and we try to inform a picture of what's really happening on the ground, real-time, to help policy makers, businesses, nonprofits, and individuals understand the world better, therefore make better decisions and promote an agenda of global prosperity and shared prosperity. Consider the Chase platform. It touches 50% of U.S. households in form or another through various products and services, and through that lens we can understand what individuals are really experiencing from the point of view of what they earn and what they spend, and what we find is that they experience very high levels of income volatility, even higher levels of consumption volatility, and this is true not just for low income households but across all income quintiles. Now it's all the more so because we find that income changes don't correspond with consumption changes, which means that people can be simultaneously exposed to income declines and consumption increases. That exposure to risk in fact,to vulnerability, is one that most households are not equipped for. In fact, we find that your average middle class household would need to have about $4,800 of money to put away to withstand a potential decrease in income and increase of consumption, which many individuals are subject to as we see in our data sample, but in fact have only $3,000. Those are examples of the kinds of findings that come out of the data we're able to mine and that give rise to new solutions and a new view of what's really happening in the economy.