benefind

Human-auditable screening pipeline for tax-exempt nonprofits, combining deterministic methods with selective LLM verification to produce precise, explainable, reproducible decisions.

Warning

Work in progress: benefind is currently under active development. Data formats, scoring logic, and CLI commands may change as we iterate.

Built by Verein für Menschen to support beneficiary partner selection for Höhenmeter für Menschen, a charity run in Winterthur.

The current workflow is tailored to Swiss public-source nonprofit screening and can be adapted to similar decision-support contexts.

What it does

benefind takes the official Canton Zurich list of tax-exempt nonprofit organizations and:

1. Parses the PDF into structured data
2. Filters to organizations in Bezirk Winterthur
3. Discovers each organization's website via search
4. Enriches from ZEFIX (UID, legal form, status, purpose) and supports focused manual ZEFIX review
5. Guesses legal form from organization names when ZEFIX has no match
6. Prepares + reviews scrape readiness to ensure safe URL targets
7. Scrapes key pages (respecting robots.txt)
8. Reviews scrape quality, then cleans duplicate intra-org content segments

Wherever uncertainty arises, items are flagged for manual review rather than silently decided.

This project is decision support, not automatic judgment. It favors conservative, inspectable steps over opaque end-to-end prompting: uncertain cases are surfaced for human review, and automated decisions are backed by saved evidence and metadata.

Why this project matters

Finding suitable charity partners manually is time-consuming. benefind helps the team:

• reduce repetitive screening work
• keep decisions transparent and reviewable
• focus human attention on ambiguous cases
• move from raw public data to an actionable shortlist

The goal is practical decision support for high-stakes shortlisting tasks where accuracy and auditability matter more than fully automatic throughput.

Documentation

• Local development
• Pipeline usage
• Configuration
• Project structure
• Project plan

Current status

This repository is in an active iteration phase.

• some heuristics are intentionally conservative
• manual review is a first-class step, not an exception
• subset-first iteration is supported (benefind subset + incremental benefind extend)
• prompts and thresholds are still being tuned with real-world examples
• docs and developer ergonomics are actively being improved
• implementation choices prioritize reliable outcomes and auditability over general-purpose abstraction

License

GPL-3.0