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.

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.

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!

How Accurate is CharityCAN’s AI Profile Summary Tool?

by | Feb 14, 2024 | AI, Features, News, Prospect Research

Donor Prospect Profiles contain a lot of data – donation records, relationship maps, real estate info, the list goes on – and typically, that’s a good thing. The more data we have, the better we are able to qualify (or disqualify) a prospect. 

That said, sometimes a high level summary will do. 

To help our users put together profile summaries, we decided to build an AI Profile Summary tool. Large Language Models (LLMs) are fantastic at summarizing large amounts of data. And LLMs are AI tech that is here now – not something that may be transformative in the future.

The video below is quick examination of the accuracy of CharityCAN’s AI Profile Summary tool:

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.