Open data on charities' online giving stats from Justcharity.org
Howard Lake | 14 October 2010 | Blogs
Open data, aggregated information, and mashups. I’ve been looking for this kind of activity in the charity sector for some time, and am delighted to report some very interesting developments from the likes of Joel Richards (@easyjo), Chris Taggart (@countculture), and David Pidsley (@davidpidsley).
Joel Richard’s justcharity.org is a tool that shows charities’ online income, including historical data, generated via Justgiving and Virgin Money Giving, together with information pulled in from Chris Taggart and Pushrod’s opencharities.org, which itself pulls in data from the Charity Commission website.
It is all presented in a handy dashboard showing totals raised, number of fundraising pages created, number of active pages, the page average incomes (compared with the site’s average incomes per page), plus a link to the charity’s latest accounts in PDF. Much of it is presented in easy to digest graphical format.
There is a list of all fundraising pages for that charity too on the two giving sites.
The site, which is still in beta, was designed to help people see at a glance which charities needed support, and to provide them with the information to help them choose which ones to support.
Justcharity.org point out that “Due to the nature of the data aggregating from various sources the data will not be 100% accurate or realtime, although we do refresh active event pages data to keep the data as current as possible”.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I suspect that the drive for this kind of data did not come from charities or fundraisers themselves. So be it. We’ve got some able people focusing on intelligent re-use of data about giving and fundraising and the sector is the better for it.
http://justcharity.org
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.