About us
An independent project making Italy’s nonprofit sector more transparent, accessible and closer to people.
Our mission
Bridging the gap between people who want to help and those who do so every day.
At the end of 2023, Italy had 368,367 active nonprofit institutions. That year, around 4.7 million people volunteered through organizations or direct help; ISTAT’s 2015 economic survey also measured more than €70 billion in total sector income. Behind those figures are people: delivering meals to isolated older people, supporting families in difficulty, caring for abandoned animals, teaching Italian to refugee children, protecting places and rebuilding social ties.
It is a vast, widespread, quiet and indispensable ecosystem: a civic fabric supporting parts of the country that public services often cannot reach.
Yet finding the right organization remains surprisingly difficult. People encounter institutional portals designed for bureaucracy, outdated websites, unusable contacts, incomplete pages and lists that are hard to interpret. Public data exists, but it is often fragmented, technical and far removed from the experience of someone looking for a practical way to contribute.
The result is a clear paradox: millions of people are ready to give time, energy, skills or money, while thousands of organizations struggle to be found by the right people.
The problem is not only discoverability. It is also trust. People often lack the information needed to understand what an organization actually does, where it works, how to contact it, whether it seeks volunteers or donations, and whether it publishes accounts or useful information. Without clarity, context and signs of reliability, even the best intention may stop.
NonProfit.it was created to break this cycle. Not to add another list to the web, but to build a genuinely useful tool: a directory designed around people and the questions they actually ask, such as:
“I want to support older people in my city.”
“I’m looking for an environmental organization in Tuscany.”
“I would like to devote two hours a week to something tangible.”
Not abstract categories or bureaucratic labels, but needs, places, causes and ways to take part.
The goal is simple to state but ambitious to achieve: no one in Italy should want to do something good and not know where to begin.
The project
A personal project built with care, rigour and conviction.
NonProfit.it is a personal project. It did not begin with funding, a grant or a startup. It began with a practical experience: trying to find a volunteer organization in my city and wasting time among broken websites, hard-to-read registers and incomplete information.
The problem was not a lack of organizations. They exist, and they are active. What was missing was a tool that could make them accessible, understandable and discoverable for people approaching Italy’s nonprofit sector.
Building this tool proved more complex than expected. Public data — from RUNTS to regional registers — is valuable but often fragmented, incomplete or inconsistent. Normalizing names, checking contacts, finding the correct websites, distinguishing active organizations and assigning meaningful categories all require time, attention and manual review.
There is no shortcut to a genuinely useful result. You either accept superficial quality or choose to work slowly and seriously. I chose the second path.
Every organization on NonProfit.it is reviewed at least once. Contact information is checked. Categories aim to reflect what the organization actually does. Profiles are built to help people make sense of the sector, not simply to fill a database. The process is not perfect, but it is taken seriously.
Technically, the project is designed to be robust and durable: an accessible responsive interface, structured searches by location, cause and participation, and a system for collecting reports and steadily improving information quality.
Over time, the aim is to make NonProfit.it a reference point for anyone engaging with Italy’s nonprofit sector: citizens, volunteers, donors, companies, schools, journalists, researchers and local authorities.
Not only a directory, but civic infrastructure for public knowledge: useful, accessible, verified and built one organization at a time.
Created by Gabriele Masetti
Help us improve NonProfit.it
If you are part of a nonprofit, you can request an update to its profile. If you know an organization that is missing, you can submit it for inclusion.