Key Features and Data 2024

by | Aug 7, 2024 | Company, Features, Guide

Features 

Donor Discovery

Donor discovery is a new way to identify prospective donors that builds on a classic donation record search by adding relationship filters. Use donor discovery to quickly identify a list of prospects who have a history of supporting your cause and have relationship map connections to your organization. 

Integrated Search 

An integrated search looks for information in all of CharityCAN’s datasets for an individual, foundation or corporation. This search is perfect for researching a prospect or finding out more information about a current donor. 

Relationship Mapping

Relationship Maps show you who your prospect is connected to. CharityCAN maps relationships based on:

  • Shared time on charity boards
  • Shared time on corporate boards
  • Shared time on the board of federally registered corporations
  • Shared ownership of a federally registered plane or boat
  • Shared surname and postal code

You can use relationship mapping to:

  • See how your prospect is connected to your organization
  • Search board members’ networks for major gift prospects
  • Better understand your prospect’s network and connections
  • See how your donors are connected to your prospects 
  • Create your own relationship maps 

Relationship Paths 

Relationship paths allows you to quickly identify connections among people, charities, and companies. This search is perfect for seeing who your board members, major donors, corporate donors, or any other friend of your organization is connected to. 

Household Data Search

Using CharityCAN to find out household data information is simple. Navigate to Household Data and enter a 3 or 6 digit postal code and CharityCAN will return the following information: 

  • Average household net worth
  • Average dwelling value
  • Average dwelling value minus mortgage
  • Average household annual income
  • Average household discretionary income
  • Average household annual donations to religious and non-religious organizations

This data set can also be used to populate a list of individuals CharityCAN has been able to associate with a postal code and view connections to any individuals who live in the postal code.  

Foundation Search 

Foundations are an important source of funding for fundraising organizations and CharityCAN makes it easy to search for potential foundation donors. You can search by name, keywords, charity number, cause/category, charity type, location and revenue level. You can also search by donee category and program.

Data 

Donation Records 

Donation records are aggregated from Canadian NOZAsearch records, which have been gathered from publicly available websites across the internet, and the gifts to qualified donees section of the T3010 charity tax filings from the Canada Revenue Agency. All donation records are updated monthly. 

Canadian Who’s Who 

Canadian Who’s Who is the standard reference source of contemporary Canadian biography, listing prominent Canadians on merit alone. Biographies are updated on an ongoing basis and each biography lists the date it was last edited.  

Political Donors 

Political contributions are from Elections Canada’s open data sets and are updated monthly. 

Refinitiv & Corporate Canada 

Both our Refinitiv salary records and Corporate Canada records are sourced from Refinitiv and include compensation and biographical information on the board of directors and top named executive officers from public and large private companies across Canada. Records come from public disclosure documents from Canadian companies required by the Canadian Securities Administrators and are updated daily. 

ZoomInfo 

ZoomInfo search results come directly from ZoomInfo’s contact database. ZoomInfo uses their diverse portfolio of proprietary technology, community of 300,000+ users, and third-party integrations to collect, organize, validate, and publish the most comprehensive directory of business data in the marketplace. 

Public Sector Salaries 

Public sector salaries are released by their respective provincial governments and imported once a year. Records are updated when governments disclose salaries.  

Charity Directors 

Data on the directors of charitable organizations are sourced from the T3010 tax filing required by each registered charity in Canada. Records are updated on a monthly basis. 

Prospect Profiles 

Prospect profiles are programmatically created profiles that attempt to identify unique individuals within the various CharityCAN datasets and bring that information together into one profile.  

Profiles are updated monthly. 

Household Data 

Household data values are estimates based on past Census data, the Survey of Household Spending, the Survey of Financial Security, the monthly Labour Force Survey and the monthly Consumer Price Index from Statistics Canada; Royal LePage’s quarterly Survey of Canadian Housing Price; and monthly housing statistics from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. 

This dataset is updated annually.  

FullContact Social Data 

FullContact social data is available on our corporate and saved prospect profiles and can provide an overview of an organization or individual’s social media accounts, a social media biography, and a summary of social media interests. 

Aircraft Registry 

Search Canadian aircraft owners with our Aircraft Registry Search. You can search for owner name, type of aircraft or geographic area to find some plane owning prospects near you. 

Marine Craft Registry

Search marine pleasure craft from Transport Canada’s Register of Vessels. Boats on this registry are mostly vessels of 7 metres or longer whose owners want to register their vessel name or need a marine mortgage. If your prospect’s name is on the list as an owner, we’ll show you the vessel’s name, size and date of registration in our Integrated Search results. 

Federal Corporations 

Data from Corporations Canada on all federally registered corporations and their directors. This data includes information on not only privately held corporations but also not-for-profits, co-operatives and boards of trade from all across the country. 

Obituaries 

Obituary data from Canada Deceased List’s ObitScan and Canada Bereavement Registry products. With their help we’ll be providing thousands of recent Canadian obituaries from public online sources every month.

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)

CharityCAN’s 2022 in Review

by | Jan 11, 2023 | Company, News

When I told the team I was going to write a blog post to summarize CharityCAN’s 2022, a colleague told me I should get ChatGPT to write it for me. So I did! Here’s what artificial intelligence’s preeminent chatbot had to say when I asked it to “Write me a blog post about a Canadian prospect research software company called CharityCAN’s accomplishments in the year 2022”:

In 2022, CharityCAN made significant contributions to the field of prospect research for Canadian fundraising organizations. As a provider of prospect research services, the company has a deep understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities that Canadian non-profit organizations face.

Aww, thanks ChatGPT! What a great way to kick off our blog post. What did we do this past year?

CharityCAN expanded its database of prospect information to include more data from a wider range of sources. This allowed their clients to access even more comprehensive information about potential donors, including their professional backgrounds, philanthropic interests, and social networks.

Hey, that’s true! We added data on Canadian obituaries and Canadian Federal Corporations and incorporated all that data into our prospect profiles and relationship mapping. Great! Anything more?

This upgrade also includes a newly improved search function that is more efficient and user-friendly, which was a key feedback from their clients. The search results are presented in a more organized and understandable format with the most relevant information at the top, including giving history, demographics and affinities, this was a game changer for the fundraising teams and allowed them to focus on the most promising leads.

OK, well you’re part of the way there. We did spend a lot of time improving the back-end functionality of our search engine, allowing users to find results quicker. I think we’re starting to get into AI gobbledygook here though. Let’s bring it home!

In summary, 2022 was a banner year for CharityCAN, with major product releases, expanding the data source and added features such as improved search function. Their achievements helped non-profit organizations and other fundraisers to identify and reach out to more high-value prospects more efficiently, which helped them to raise more funds for their causes. The recognition by the industry further validates their position as a leader in the market, with a lot of room to grow.

Not bad! Well done, ChatGPT.

It feels especially fitting to use an AI chatbot to write our first blog post of 2023 because we’re hoping to dive into deep learning in a big way this year here at CharityCAN. The field has made huge strides (as evidenced by ChatGPT, among other significant advancements) and we’re currently brainstorming ways we can use the technology to improve CharityCAN and our donor screening product for our users.

I look forward to sharing more as we experiment! Happy New Year, everyone!

CharityCAN’s 2021 Roundup

by | Jan 19, 2022 | Company, News

As we start 2022 here in CharityCAN’s home base of Waterloo, Ontario, in some ways it feels eerily like the start of 2021: working from home with limited contact with friends, family and coworkers, with lockdown measures in place to stop another COVID wave from crashing over our healthcare system.

In this Groundhog Day of a January it’s been too easy for me lately to feel down and sometimes hard to concentrate on anything that’s not just getting through the next day of home confinement, including our work here at CharityCAN.

That’s why it’s been nice for me today to take a look back at everything our fantastic team has done in 2021 to put things in perspective and to get me excited about the things we have coming up in 2022.

Company Updates

In company news, 2021 saw us implement a blind interview selection process that we’ve used to select our co-op students. We still have a pretty small sample size, but anecdotally the process has led to a diverse group of students selected as candidates.

Like many companies, we also experimented with reduced working hours over the summer. Feedback from employees was positive and we didn’t see any sort of difference in our business operations, so it’s something I hope we’ll do again this summer!

We also partnered with a company called Patch to make sure CharityCAN is carbon neutral going forwards.

Last but certainly not least, two employees (myself included!) welcomed new additions to their families.

Product Updates

Of course the other thing we love to look back on here is what we accomplished with our CharityCAN family of products over the year.

This year we saw the addition of some new data sets, including Canada’s private aircraft and marine craft registries and public sector salaries from Manitoba. What’s especially exciting about these new features for me is that they were created internally by an employee who took on the challenge of learning to code on the job – these were their first additions to our platform!

Besides the new data sets, we also added some major new features. After doing a lot of work behind the scenes, we introduced Donor Discovery, a new way to do prospect identification based on relationship and donation data.

We also launched Avenue Donor Data, a separate add-in for Raiser’s Edge NXT that allows you to view our CharityCAN Household Data alongside donor constituent records.

We added new features to our prospect profiles, like letting you export a customized PDF version of the profile, and letting you easily connect profiles to your organization so you can use their connections in our relationship path searches.

What’s Next

Through my volunteer experience this last year with Apra Canada (become a member if you’re not already!) and from participating in a study that found a significant return on investment from prospect research in the fundraising world, it feels like prospect research in Canada is still a rapidly growing field. We’re excited to be able to play a part in that growing world as more fundraisers start using data to make better fundraising decisions.

Here’s to 2022 and all the new challenges and successes it will bring!

Going Carbon Neutral

by | Sep 21, 2021 | Company

Here at CharityCAN, we help Canadian charities make positive change in the world by giving them the tools to fundraise more effectively.

But we don’t just want to do our part to improve where we live – we also want to make sure we’re not doing anything to make it worse.

That’s why this summer, we started to offset the company’s carbon emissions in an effort to become carbon neutral.

To achieve this goal, we’re working with a company called Patch to calculate the carbon that running our company and software produces and then purchase carbon offsets to reduce that carbon footprint.

As a small software company, we don’t produce physical goods, so there’s nothing to offset there. But we do run our software on cloud servers, which of course run on electricity. Most of our cloud infrastructure is hosted on Microsoft Azure, which has been carbon neutral since 2012. But we do have some servers running on other services that are not carbon neutral, so we’re offsetting those.

We’re also a remote-first company, so we don’t have a big office building to power. But we do have employees using electricity at their own homes, and we purchase and throw out computer equipment and other office supplies. To calculate how much carbon each employee uses, we borrowed from Basecamp’s estimates as they’re also a remote-first SaaS company.

For the time being we’re using Patch to offset our carbon by funding forestry projects. When our company gets a little bigger we hope to be more ambitious and start funding some carbon sequestration projects as well.

This is just a start – hopefully one day we can join some of the companies who have committed to becoming carbon negative. Until then, we can at least do our part to make sure we’re not putting more carbon into the atmosphere, and encourage other small businesses like ours to do the same.