New database unites public information on charities in England & Wales
Melanie May | 2 July 2018 | News
A free, open source charity data portal, CharityBase, has launched, providing public information on the activities, locations and finances of the 168,000 charities registered in England and Wales.
A database, API and web platform, CharityBase is an aggregation of Charity Commission data services and other sources including names, locations, causes, trustees, and size for all charities in England and Wales. Users can search and filter the database and browse the results online or download them for analysis.
Key points:
- CharityBase provides information on the activities, locations, finances, trustees & beneficiaries of 168,000 charities registered in England & Wales.
- It is an aggregation of the Charity Commission’s four online services, supplemented with geographical and grants data from other sources.
- Researchers can use the web platform to search, filter and download the database.
- For web developers there is also an API that makes it easy to pull information from CharityBase into their own websites.
- Donors, grantmakers and philanthropists can also use the web platform to look up charities and carry out due diligence.
- The project is entirely open source: https://github.com/charity-base
- The next steps are to add more countries and build in functionality for charities to update their records online.
Creator Dan Kwiatkowski, who is a freelance data scientist and fellow of Newspeak House, said:
“I created CharityBase after realising there’s a lot of useful public data on charities out there but it’s not easily accessible. The official data services are fragmented and I had many conversations with researchers, app developers and donors who were all struggling to piece the information together. Rather than everyone hacking their own solutions independently I want us to work together on a comprehensive service that makes the data accessible to everyone.”
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.