The SoGood Charity Mapper: Making it easy to find local charities in the UK
The problem with Third Sector data
The Third Sector has a pretty big problem when it comes to data. Everyone who is collecting data is asking different questions, segmenting charities and organisations in different ways, and storing their data in different formats. Data thus exists in multiple disconnected silos — making working with it very difficult.
SoGood’s focus in this area
We’ve set it as our goal to affect real improvement in the capture and presentation of data in the charity sector. That can be summed up by four key pillars:
- Improving the quality of data capture and storage
- Creating a consistent taxonomy that helps analytics — and makes data more actionable (see our SoGood Lens)
- Cutting through the noise to surface useable data and make it very accessible for those who need it
- Building intelligence and predictive analytics into data to further improve efficiencies in the sector
One dataset we view as a clear area where we can have an impact — and which aligns with pillars 1 and 2 — is mapping UK charities themselves. Based on our research, there’s no high-quality, exhaustive, centralised online tool where it’s possible to view all the local charity access points by purpose in a specific area across the country.
Our solution: The SoGood Charity Mapper
To solve this problem, we’re creating a Charity Mapper for the UK. That means embarking on a data capture project on all UK-registered charities and overlaying their geographical access points.
For example, Sue Ryder has over 400 charity shops across the UK; Trussell Trust has more than 1300 food banks. Many charities have multiple locations; they’ll all be easily visible on our map. This will be, to our minds, the first time this data will be brought together in one place and made available by a simple online tool — with charities searchable depending on their category and geography.
Coming soon
This level of data capture is clearly a huge task. We’ve made a positive start and expect to have a usable first version by the end of March 2024.
To learn more about SoGood’s work and the development of this project, read the full article on our site.
