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Commission to look at Facebook-style app to link local charities

IT | Tania Mason | 31 May 2011

Charity Commission chair Dame Suzi Leather has suggested that the regulator might look at introducing a Facebook-style application that tells charities what other charities exist nearby that carry out similar activities.

At the Commission’s public meeting last week, Dame Suzi and Commission CEO Sam Younger were told that far too many charities were doing the same or similar things within a small area yet were unaware of each other.

Dame Suzi responded: “It’s true that charities are not sufficiently aware of each other’s existence or activities and there may be more we can do through the clever IT stuff, perhaps in the same way that Facebook tells you who among your friends is linked with everybody else on Facebook, perhaps there’s something we can do with that to help charities.”

Sam Younger used the meeting to outline various new IT projects the Commission is planning as part of its drive to improve its provision of information to the public.

“As well as examining whether we are providing the right information to the public, we are also looking at whether we are presenting it well enough,” he said.  

Younger said the online register was due for a refresh, new search pages would be launched allowing better comparisons between charities, and a mobile phone app would be created to let people access the register on their mobile phones.

The Commission will also make more data available on large charities by releasing Summary Information Return data, and plans to open up the online database to third-party applications via an application programming interface, he said.

Opencharities founder critical of Commission's IT offering

But not everybody was impressed by the Commission’s use of technology. Chris Taggart, founder of opencharities.org, a website that aims to make the information on the online register more accessible, criticised the Commission’s digital strategy.

He said that Google searches for individual charities usually won’t return the relevant pages on the Commission’s online register, because of the way they’re designed – a glaring fault if the Commission is keen to make the public more aware that the sector is tightly regulated in order to increase trust and confidence.

He also said: “Now you’re talking about doing a type of API (application programming interface) that the rest of the world stopped using five years ago. You should be looking at usability, how people want to interact with it.”

Taggart added: “You have to wonder what Steve Jobs (Apple founder) would do if he took over the running of the Charity Commission. You’d have something that, as soon as you got there, you understood it. For one thing, the website wouldn’t have 50 things going on on the front page. And all charity websites would have to have a little button stating ‘Registered with the Charity Commission’, which would be a link to that charity’s entry on the Commission’s website. It would be incredibly clear for the users.

“That clarity and straightforwardness would increase trust, clarify things and benefit the sector and the people it helps.”

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Who's Who: Sam Younger | Suzi Leather