This dashboard can be used to explore and compare Canadian charities active internationally; by revenue, share of revenue from federal government, from gifts, from sources outside Canada, and the size of operations outside Canada.
About
The data presented consists of information pulled from the T3010 tax returns filed with Canada Revenue Agency by all registered Canadian charities.
The public information contains data on each organization’s finances, human resources, gifts to other charities and eligible recipients of charitable funding (qualified donees), and some information about charitable activities. All of the data is self-reported by the charities, and is infrequently validated or audited by the CRA. These two factors compromise the quality of the data, so that analysis of this data can never be completely accurate.
The CRA data is complemented with open data from the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFATD).
For analytical purposes here, two limitations are placed on the wider charities data which for the year in question (2012) contained around 6100 organizations. This list is limited to: those organizations that had any operations outside Canada, and furthermore to those that had operations outside Canada that were funded by (former) Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
That brings the data down from 6100 to about 161 organizations, that conducted expenditures outside Canada on projects, programs or other activities, totaling CAD$ 1.3 billion (approx).
How to use this data
This data can be used to compare organizations in terms of overall size (revenue), size of operations outside Canada, share of revenue funded by the federal government, amounts received from other registered charities, and amounts received from sources outside Canada.
Simply click on the circles (holding down control), or use the drop-down menu to search for and select organizations for comparison.
The view can also be limited by the overall size (revenue) of organizations, or by the size of their expenditures outside Canada.
Currently, data is provided for 2012 (but further data including time series 2010 to 2013 will be updated shortly).
Several other fields and data points are available upon request.
Hi Aniket,
This is a great initiative. I am wondering, however, whether you will be developing a more comprehensive list of charities – to at least include a fuller set of good sized organizations? For example, I notice that neither WUSC nor our close partner CECI are on your list.
As well, I am wondering how are going to treat volunteer inputs into organizations. For example, I notice one good sized organization for which close of its stated revenue is actually volunteer time (overseas).
Chris
Thanks for pointing this out Chris. We have an update which may take care of it. However it is entirely automated and dependent on sources – i.e. if CECI and WUSC are in both sources they should show up. We do not make any manual adjustments, besides the two mentioned: a) operations outside Canada (and reported as such) and b) operations outside Canada funded by former CIDA (and reported as such).
Thanks again.