Building a Knowledge‐Driven Nonprofit Sector - 2019‐2020 Alberta Nonprofit Data Strategy Final Report and Project Plans (2020)

What is this research about?

The Alberta Nonprofit Data Strategy was launched in 2018 to enhance the nonprofit and voluntary sector’s use of data. This project interviewed informants about the current state of data capacity, data sharing, and the access and use of open data in the nonprofit and voluntary sector, and what steps were required at organization and sector levels to appropriately meet the needs of the sector. Informants also considered how a data hub could support the sector’s use of data.

What did the researchers find?

"From November 2019 to March 2020, each task team engaged the nonprofit sector and developed recommendations for action. The Data Hub Task Team researched national and international data platforms, and interviewed data hub moderators to develop a data hub model to best meet the needs of the Alberta nonprofit sector. The Newcomer Task Team scanned for current data initiatives in the Immigrant and Refugee sector, and the nonprofit sector more broadly in Alberta to document learnings from exemplars and assess gaps. The Government of Alberta (GoA) Data Task Team surveyed the nonprofit sector to better understand what the sector considered as high‐value data, and matched those responses with data on the GoA Open Portal.

Eight projects of varying scale were developed through the work of Task Teams and key informant suggestions. Projects are intentionally designed to be developed further and launched by collaboratives and organizations big and small within this sector‐wide effort. Leveraging existing projects and identifying additional funding opportunities are critical to the implementation of these projects as well. The projects proposed (see below) target data capacity building, data sharing, nonprofit organization data, Government of Alberta data, and the development of an Alberta Nonprofit Data Hub."