New website aims to make register of charities more accessible

Finance | Gareth Jones | 14 Sep 2010

A new website has been launched which is attempting to make the Charity Commission’s register of charities available in a clearer and more accessible way.

OpenCharities has used screen-scraping techniques to extract details of 150,422 charities from the online register, circumnavigating the Commission’s limit of 500 results per search.

It includes a unique URL for each charity based upon its charity number, basic information for each one and the ability to sort charities by their income or expenditure.

The full data has also been made available as a single 20MB spreadsheet file.

The site has been spearheaded by Chris Taggart, a web developer who had previously focused his attentions on opening up local council data with the Openly Local website.

The charity data has also been incorporated into Openly Local, revealing what charities local councils are funding and by how much.

Writing about OpenCharities in his blog, Taggart says that “for now, it’s just the simplest of things”, but that he is prepared to extend the functionality of the site if there is sufficient interest.

He adds that at this stage it is “very much an alpha application”, with some data missing such as the incomes of the larger charities.

Directory: Charity Commission

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