Charities' data now available to benefit the public and the economy
Thursday 1 December 2011
The Charities Commission has taken the significant step of releasing all the data published on the publicly-searchable Charities Register, in a format that can be downloaded for analysis by any member of the public.
Speaking at the Charities Commission’s annual meeting, chief executive Trevor Garrett says that anyone can now access and analyse data about the 25,500 charities registered by the Commission, and, if they wish, combine it with other datasets.
“We believe this is a public-sector leading initiative. This is one of the first “real-time” sets of data to be released by government, and it can be freely used by any member of the public – including businesses, funders, researchers, academics, news media, and government agencies,“ he says.
Mr Garrett says that the initiative is in keeping with the government’s expectation that agencies should release all non-personal and unclassified data with high potential value for re-use that benefits the public and the economy.
The Commission has released an Application Programming Interface (API) that it is encouraging web and software developers to access, so they can make use of the information the Commission holds about charities, their activities, their finances, their staff and volunteers, where they are operating, and their charitable activities.
All registered charities’ data has always been in the public domain on the Register (at www.register.charities.govt.nz), but Mr Garrett says the Commission hopes that also making it available as Open Data will encourage greater use and analysis of the data.
More than 25,500 registered charities have contributed to the Commission’s dataset through the information in their application records and Annual Returns. The data is updated every day, as the Commission receives Annual Returns and registers new charities, and removes charities that are no longer eligible for registration.
The Commission has also created a new Advanced Search on its website, that can be used to access all the Register data. Anyone can use it to find out and analyse information about the charitable sector. The Advanced Search results come as a downloadable .csv file that can be opened in a spreadsheet - which can be sorted, totalled, or used to create graphs.
Mr Garrett says that the information published on the Charities Register provides a valuable picture of the charitable sector’s impact on the economy, and the significant contribution it makes to New Zealand’s social fabric.