The Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action has partnered with an investigative news website for a data project to help charities understand more about the communities that they work in.

Nicva members and other voluntary sector groups will work with The Detail to analyse, collect and present issues about their communities. A publicly accessible online data store will be created through the project.

The project has received £500,000 from the Big Lottery Fund and The Detail expects to publish 30 data driven news stories over the course of the three-year project.

Steven McCaffery, editor of The Detail, said: “This project will ensure that our data journalism can help the voluntary and community sector to better understand and voice the needs of people and communities.”

“By connecting our data journalism to organisations working at community level it can become a tool to be used to benefit the lives of people across Northern Ireland.”

Seamus McAleavey, chief executive of Nicva, said: “We know that the community and voluntary sector could make better use of the huge amount of data that there is available, if they knew how to find and examine the data. Nicva has been developing the sector’s skills in the use of data for some time. This project will help us extend that work so it reaches even greater numbers of people.”