Improving benefacts.ie

Since it went live in May 2016, Benefacts has had lots of useful feedback from nonprofits listed on benefacts.ie. Some people want to know more about where the data comes from, and why it’s occasionally not comprehensive or up to date.

Fresh every day

Benefacts relies heavily on data provided by nonprofits to their regulators, mainly the CRO, and the Charities Regulator. We update the Database of Irish Nonprofits every day.

Most of the time, our data matches what’s on the public record, but sometimes it takes a while for the regulators to register new filings, and this delay is reflected on benefacts.ie. They are aware of the issue and are cooperating with us to address anomalies wherever we find them. Bear with us, and please contact us if you have concerns about anything that appears on your Benefacts listing.

More and better financial data

Benefacts extracts a lot of highly relevant information from the financial statements of nonprofits in the Database of Irish Nonprofits. Sometimes, this doesn’t include a breakdown of the sources of government funding. We illustrate this on the listing of every nonprofit, where the data is published in the accounts.

Some nonprofits have asked us to improve on what they filed in their 2014 financial statements, with a breakdown of funding sources. We are happy to update the record and publish the new information, so long as this is provided in a letter from the Directors. Ask us if this is something you would like to explore.

Non-regulatory data

Not everything on benefacts.ie is derived from a regulatory source. We went looking for the URL of every nonprofit in our database, and we found most of them. Inevitably, these go out of date from time to time, and we check on this periodically. If your organisation has a URL that is different to what is currently listed – or it’s missing altogether – email us and we’ll fix it.

We also provided a classification code for every nonprofit, so that we could help people to get a better understanding of this sector. Read more about this in our knowledge base,  tell us if you’re not happy with the classification we assigned, we’re keen to get this right.