Exploring Purposes of NPOs: Text Mining of NPO Missions

Abstract

This study aims to investigate missions of NPO in Japanese contexts. With little previous quantitative research due to its difficult approach, this study focuses on missions of NPO in terms of text mining in order to show the differences between NPOs which are registered by prefecture. We use text mining and network analysis for this study. Mission statements are collected from Japanese NPOs (data is collected from 1,036 Japanese NPOs certified by the Kyoto Prefecture and 6,544 Japanese NPOs certified by the Tokyo Metropolis) and frequently used words are extracted to compare those NPOs. Also, the network of the words frequently used is examined for NPOs certified by the Kyoto Prefecture. The result shows the following features; First, there is ambiguity of missions. Second, the mission may have been affected in its creation by each prefecture as certification authorities in terms of the institutional theory. Finally, there are possibilities of cross-sectional collaboration with other NPOs. Findings from this study suggest that text mining is one important analytical way to know about missions of NPOs, although the difficulty of conducting text mining should be pointed out.