Another year has come and gone here at CharityCAN! Longtime CharityCAN users may know that this year was a year of big changes here at our parent company of Third Sector Publishing. At the end of 2017, our founder (and my father) Anderson retired, and I moved from my role of VP Software to full-fledged CEO. With the Canadian Donor’s Guide, the annual reference book for Canadian donors that we used to publish, in the very capable hands of Alison Stoneman, we set about to put all our energy into CharityCAN and move ahead into 2018 as a fully focused software company.

Here we are, almost a year later, and thanks to our awesome team and our amazing users, we’ve been able to keep moving forward and make some great improvements to our prospect research and relationship mapping software, with more on the way.

As the New Year approaches, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of lists (TV Shows? Podcasts?), and we thought we could contribute by listing some of the key new features that have appeared on CharityCAN over the past year.

Personalized Prospect Profiles

We’ve worked hard to make sure you can tie any piece of data from anywhere in CharityCAN into a profile for an individual. Quickly see board positions, donations, relationships, social media information and more with one quick profile view, and create your own profiles that our algorithm missed out on.

New Relationship Mapping Features

We launched a new relationship graph engine that allowed us to introduce a new relationship map of an individual’s connections to organizations as well as people. It also gives users the ability to filter any of our relationship maps or relationship path searches so you can customize each search by relationship type, recency and strength.

We’ve also started using this graph engine to surface prospects your organization is connected to. When you set a default organization in either our Relationship Paths search or My Prospect Profiles page, we can suggest prospects for you based on their connections to your board.

New Data Sets

We added two new data sets in 2018: first, comprehensive compensation information thanks to Thomson Reuters for directors and named executive officers of public companies in North America. Secondly, we added FullContact social media data, appending social insights to corporate, charity and individual profiles where available.

New Visualizations

One of our newest features, we’ve started working on adding some new visualizations to our profiles, starting with donation records on charity and individual giving history. We’re going to continue to look at new and interesting ways to link and present the data in CharityCAN.

What’s Next

We have a few ideas about what we’ll be working on in 2019, but our best source of ideas come from you, our users (and potential users!). If you have something you’d like to see in CharityCAN, please get in touch and let us know! We’ve got some of the best customers a company could ask for, and we always love connecting with you.

Thanks again to everyone we’ve met along the way this past year. We look forward to meeting new people and forging new relationships in the new year!