Irish charity listing service established
Howard Lake | 24 June 2015 | News
Details have been revealed of a new online service which from 2016 will give the public access to the financial and legal details of the 12,000 registered not-for-profit bodies in Ireland.
Benefacts.ie will include a listing, developed on a phased basis, for every charity and voluntary body currently active in Ireland, with information about their purposes, their governance and, where this is available, their finances and sources of income.
Besides publishing the information freely on the public website, Benefacts.ie will make extracts available to users in the charitable sector as well as funders, policy-makers, regulators, analysts, service-providers and the media.
Users of the data will be able to get a picture not just of the sector and its component parts but also the contribution of the sector at large to Irish society, according to the website.
The initiative is supported over three years by the Irish government, the Atlantic Philanthropies and the American Ireland Funds who have contributed €1.95 million, €1.8 million and €400,000 respectively. After this period Benefacts say they will be exploring ways to fund the cost of the service.
Benefacts is developing the work of the Irish Nonprofits Knowledge Exchange (INKEx), a project funded by government, the European Commission, Irish charities and philanthropists which, between 2007 and 2012, built and tested a freely available online database of Irish charities.
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.