We have recently made several updates to the CharityData.ca site.
The most important updates are as follows:
- We brought in almost all 2022 data, but it is not yet complete, and therefore, the base year remains for now 2021. Hopefully, soon, we will have all 2022 data from CRA, and the base year can be adjusted to 2022.
- We have brought in significant additional data under the “Program” tab that relates to Qualifying Disbursements made by way of grant to grantees, which is the new system that the Income Tax Act provided as of June 2022. A few charities have used the new system although we are suggesting for almost all groups that the structured arrangement rules are better for the moment.
- Under the Director tab where you can search any Canadian directors of registered charities, we now display not only names but also their position.
- We have increased the results displayed for certain matters. For example, the largest gifts to qualified donees previously was the largest 200 over 5 years, and it is now 300 over 10 years. Also, “Gifts Received from Other Registered Charities Over Last 10 Years (Top 300)” on the “Fundraising Tab” was only 5 years and 200 before.
- Although the site says “19 years in-depth data on Canadian registered charities”, in fact, for most registered charities, there are now 20 years of data.
Maintaining the website is a lot of work but it is an important transparency tool and we are gratified that lots of people are using it. Over the last month for example, about 32,000 users were on the site and the ‘event count’ was 367,000. Google explains “Event Count in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) measures how often users interact with specific elements on a website within a given time span. The higher the number, the more likely users are to find something worth clicking, watching, or purchasing on the site.”