Data Gap - Usability

Data Gap - Usability

The Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy warned that data availability in philanthropy is at risk.
I'd add that even where data exists, most of the sector can't use it.

Take the 990. It is the backbone of philanthropic transparency. It shows funding flows, financial health, governance, revenue mix.

And yet almost no one makes decisions from it directly.

It is filed late.
Released later.
Structured for compliance, not analysis.

By the time anyone sees the data, it's 18 months old.

So a foundation needs to ask each grantee for updated financials. A nonprofit builds a prospect list for funders who exited that program area last year.

The entire sector ends up duplicating the same data work thousands of times.

When we built Impala, we started by asking how to extract more signal from the data that already exists.

Normalize it.
Structure it.
Make it comparable across time.
Make it legible at the ecosystem level.

If more datasets go away, that is serious.

But the datasets we have are only useful when they are viewed as part of a larger funding market.