At the Connecting Up Conference last week I was pleased to meet and talk with two of the clever people from the Charities Commission of NZ. They were beside themselves with excitement over their new innovation and I am too.

The Charities Commission is the regulator for non-profit and charities in NZ. There they have one place and one way for a non-profit to register. In Australia we have many many confusing and convoluted rules and registration processes.

They also collect data from their non-profits and charities. The annual returns include officers, areas of activity and financial performance including major income sources.

This is seriously useful data. For example:

• I want to donate to an organisation that is not reliant on government funding.
• I am starting a non-profit and I want to see how many others do the same thing as me in the same area.
• I making a grant application for my non-profit and it will help to benchmark my performance against other organisations.

At the conference Holly Ross gave the example of a food coop that were serving the poorest people in the city. When they actually did a mashup of their service outlets, other food services outlets and the average household income in the city, they discovered that the very poorest were not actually being serviced by anyone. It is examples like this that make this kind of data, in the hands of clever people, a tool for social change.

So back to the Charities Commission NZ ...

There are many Government datasets already available in NZ http://www.data.govt.nz . Most of them are file format (spreadsheet or CSV or PDF) there are only a few online databases and even fewer with an API. Charities Commission NZ have an online search interface to their live database and an API.

They are also working closely with the open data comunity in NZ to make better documentation.

Search the NZ charity register 

Information on using the data

API

I hope that the new Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission will take the lead from Charities Commission NZ and facilitate access to their data in a similar way.