Introducing the CharityCAN ARK

by | Sep 23, 2025 | Features

The Problem

Finding out where a potential donor has made charitable donations is hard work. Data from the CRA details donations from registered charities in Canada, but individual donations can only be found when they’re published via thank you messages and donor recognition walls in annual reports or online donor walls.

These types of donation records have always been available in CharityCAN because in the past we’ve been fortunate enough to license donation data from other providers. But this data had its issues too: without a copy of the donation source document, we couldn’t provide our users with accurate reference documents – a must-have for any serious prospect researcher. We also noticed that there were gaps in the data: smaller Canadian organizations and charities in Quebec were particularly underrepresented.

We’ve always been asked about the possibility of more of these donation records, but we’re a small team and ensuring data accuracy from so many different source documents was always a hurdle that was too big to clear. Until now!

The Solution

Recent advancements in AI don’t just lend themselves to chatbots. Advanced language models are also great at turning unstructured data into structured data – turning donor walls into database rows.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve harnessed the power of these models in what we’re calling the CharityCAN ARK: the Archived Record Keeper. The ARK has started archiving and processing donation records at scale, with the goal of surveying every Canadian charity for donation data on an ongoing basis.

These donation records have already made their way into CharityCAN’s donation record search results. Over the coming months you’ll see more data as we expand to more organizations and process our backlog of archived data sources. You’ll also be able to use this data in more places of our platform, including our donor screening and relationship data, so keep an eye out for more announcements.

Our Responsible Rollout

The reason we’re doing this piece by piece and moving slowly is that we want to ensure that we’re giving you, our users, data you can count on.

Even though we’re confident enough in our process to start publishing this data, the reality is that because we’re using AI models to process this data on a large scale, a few mistakes will slip through the cracks. Since we are providing our users with direct links to the archived source data, you’ll always be able to check our donation records to make sure they’re correct.

If they’re not correct – we want you to let us know about it. Did you find an issue in one of our records? Reach out and we’ll fix it! By letting us know, you’ll help us improve the ARK for other users going forward.

And if we’re missing data? Let us know that too! We can let you know if we can go looking for specific donation records, and if we can’t (say that organization’s website doesn’t allow web crawling or archiving) we’ll let you know.

We’re excited to move forward with the CharityCAN ARK and all the new data it will bring to the platform. As always, reach out to us with any questions or to see some of the new archives and records for yourself.

AI Donor Summaries for Foundations and Corporations

by | Apr 26, 2024 | AI, Features

A few months ago, we launched our AI Donor Summaries feature for individual CharityCAN prospect profiles. Today, we’re expanding this exciting beta feature so that our users can create donor summaries for foundations and corporations as well!

One of the jobs prospect researchers are tasked with is compiling information on a prospective donor. Valueable information like past donations, areas of support, a quick biography, and more are found and compiled into a report that might be used for a prospect review meeting.

With our AI donor summaries, CharityCAN can now create these types of quick reports for each of the types of donors in our database with the click of a button. We take all of the real, verifiable information in our database of Canadian donors and ask a large language model to summarize that data into a few easily digestible paragraphs.

This means organizations and fundraisers without dedicated prospect researchers can use CharityCAN to help them quickly get a glimpse of a new donor, or enable a prospect researcher to quickly add a summary to a note in a donor database to justify further review.

These new donor summaries lend themselves so well to donor database use cases that we’ve also created a new add-in for our integrations with Blackbaud Rasier’s Edge NXT. With only one click you can create a summary of a constituent’s CharityCAN data and import it directly into your database.

To get started with any of these features, please reach out to us for a demo!

You can also check out these summaries in action over on our YouTube page!

CharityCAN’s 2023: Models and weights and biases, oh my!

by | Dec 18, 2023 | Company

It’s the end of 2023, which means it’s time to take a look back to see what’s happened at CharityCAN over the last 12 months.

Since we’re a tech company at heart, you can probably guess that this wrap up will talk about artificial intelligence (AI) quite a bit. You’re not wrong! As I alluded to in our 2022 roundup, we started off the year diving into deep learning in a big way. The whole development team worked on a deep learning for coders course so we could wrap our heads around some of the underpinnings of the huge advancements in AI that have appeared in the last year or so.

We took the concepts we learned there and started playing around with tools offered by OpenAI around their GPT language models to experiment and see what we could apply to CharityCAN. I’m not always one to hop on the “new shiny tech” bandwagon – there are plenty of times in the past where we’ve been promised amazing things by AI (self-driving cars, anyone?) only for the reality to fall short of expectations. This time seems different though – maybe because we’ve already been able to work with language-model powered tools ourselves to get real results.

This year, we’ve used language models like Github Copilot internally to help our developers write and understand code. I’ve used ChatGPT with DALL·E to help generate presentations or to understand concepts in deep learning. And we’ve been able to use language models in our platform to build and create new features.

The first of those features to be released to the public was our AI-generated snapshots in our Prospect Profiles. These summaries take the raw data available in CharityCAN and turn it into something easily digestible. You can export or import those summaries where you need them, saving the time of writing your own prospect briefs. I love this feature because it aligns with where I think we’re going with AI in the near-term: a future where CharityCAN users can use our platform and other AI-powered tools to save time doing menial tasks so you can have more time to do the things that are really valuable. In prospect research, that might mean that CharityCAN can suggest and prepare reports on new potential major gift prospects, and prospect researchers and managers can focus on the best way to approach and connect with those new donors.

In non-AI related features, we also added new ways to mine your organization’s connections in CharityCAN. Ways to see how you are connected to donors geographically, as well as finding connected Federal Corporations. Also ways to see donation information directly in individual connections so you can better find those valuable connections in your network.

In terms of new data, we added donor demographics to our postal code data and new granting information for registered Canadian charities – plus new ways to use that data in our donor screening.

I’m excited to see what 2024 will bring – we’ll hopefully have some exciting new things to share soon!

A programmer working at a desk

A stereotypical software developer diving into deep learning, as presented by DALL·E (not bad except I can’t grow a beard in real life)

Prospect Profile Additions

by | Oct 27, 2023 | Features, News

Our prospect profiles just got some new additions this past week. We’ve got a lot going on, so let’s dive in!

Profile Snapshots

The first thing CharityCAN users will notice is that Prospect Profiles have a new front page summarizing things like donations, recent board positions, connections and household data. We’re bringing out recent or important information and putting it all on one page. From the snapshot you can jump out to view more detailed profile information, so you can dive into the nitty-gritty.

We think this will be a great first starting point when researching a new potential major gift donor.

AI-Generated Summaries (Beta)

The other thing that appears on our snapshots is our new AI-Generated summaries. We’re using Open AI‘s GPT language model to summarize raw profile data into easily digestible text summaries.  This is one of the new features we’re most excited about, as we think there are a lot of possibilities for these summaries. This feature will enable a researcher or a fundraiser to get a quick paragraph to add to an email, profile, or donor database. We’ll dive a little more into how we’re putting these together in a future blog post.

This feature is in beta and will probably be updated in the coming weeks and months, so we’d love to hear how you’re interested in using it!

Relationship Donation Filters

Every Prospect Profile has a full list of relationships. These are connections to other individuals through charity and company boards or other known organizations. We’ve taken that list of relationships and overlayed our donation data, so that not only can you see your prospect’s connections, but also which of those connections are donors to other organizations.

What’s more, you can now filter this relationship list to find donors by cause, amount or location. You can bring up a profile of a volunteer and quickly see if they have any new prospects in their network.

A Prospect Profile Snapshot

 

Profile Snapshots

 

AI-Generated Summaries (Beta)

The other thing that appears on our snapshots is our new AI-Generated summaries. We’re using Open AI‘s GPT language model to summarize raw profile data into easily digestible text summaries. This is a beta feature, so we’d love to hear your feedback!

Relationship Donation Filters

In the Prospect Profiles Relationships section, scroll down to the Full Relationship List to try filtering relationships by donation data. You’ll see prospect connections filtered by donation cause, amount and locatoin so you can easily mine relationships to find new potential donors.

New Data Now Available In Donor Screening

by | Mar 9, 2023 | Donor Screening, Features, News

We’re pleased to announce that all the new data we’ve added over the last year in CharityCAN is now available as part of our donor screening data.

Now when you use CharityCAN to screen your donor database, we’ll return three new data points:

  • Federal Corporation directorships that match your donor
  • Aircraft ownership
  • Boat ownership

For additional fees, we can also append:

  • Matching obituary data
  • Detailed donor demographics detailing overall charitable behaviours

While we were in there adding these data points, we also improved our matching algorithm and our output format, so you get more information in your output file and more transparency about what kind of matches we were able to find.

Best of all, you can now use custom graph relationships while screening to see if a donor has a relationship to your organization.

Don’t forget, we can always work with you to integrate your donor screening results back into your donor database so you can slice, dice or analyze it to your heart’s content.

Or are you looking for something more sophisticated like predictive modelling? We’d love to hear about your project goals and work with you to come up with something that fits your organization.

Please contact us if you’d like to see some examples of our new screening output or to talk more about how we can help you get more out of your donor data.