[CivicAccess-discuss] The Canadian advantage in non-profit data

[Michael Lenczner]

I wrote a blog post for the federal Open Data blog that I wanted to share
here. It was just published today. Any feedback is welcome.

Michael Lenczner
CEO, Ajah
http://www.ajah.ca
514-708-5112

------------
"Canada - a World Leader in Non-profit Data"

By Michael Lenczner (Guest blogger)

In 2010, I started Ajah to use data to help fundraisers identify likely
sources of funding. Because I had been active in the Open Data movement
since 2005, I knew that the information that they needed was out there. We
worked hard for several years to build our service, Fundtracker.

Fundtracker required combining many data sets: government spending data at
both federal and provincial levels, charity financial information and
granting records, corporate social responsibility information, and even
charities’ annual reports. We launched our most recent version of the
service last fall and our clients have been responding enthusiastically.

By 2013 we were receiving recognition from outside of Canada for building a
successful business using open data, and developing insights into the
funding ecosystem that we offer our clients. At first we chalked up our
success to our abilities as expert technologists with a deep understanding
of the non-profit sector. As we continued to learn about non-profit sectors
in other countries we realized none of them had anything approaching the
amount of data available in Canada. That was the principal reason for our
lead in this space.

----snip----

http://data.gc.ca/eng/blog/ajah-and-fundtracker
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://civicaccess.ca/pipermail/civicaccess-discuss/attachments/20140704/f27163b9/attachment.html>