Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Stanford Social Innovation Review post, Foundation Center President Bradford K. Smith discusses how organizations can take steps in offering more data and information to the nonprofit community.

• The Solutions Bank, a free online resource for users to explore grant proposals, was created out of the MacArthur Foundation's 100&Change competition. How can we use knowledge sharing to transform the sector?

• Here's a guide for funders when it comes to collecting, storing and sharing data.

Foundation Center, the leading source of information about philanthropy worldwide, is at the crossroads of foundations and their nonprofit partners. We maintain years of in-depth data about grantmaking and provide tools and training to help the grant seekers find funding. From nonprofits, we frequently hear such questions as: “How do I get a grant from a foundation that doesn’t accept unsolicited proposals?” “Why do foundations request so much information?” “What do foundations do with all that information?”

Questions like these have a way of focusing the mind. It is increasingly difficult to provide suitable answers in an age when technology has transformed the ways in which we find, consume, supply, and process information in most every other realm of our lives. For several years, Foundation Center has worked to improve knowledge-sharing practices of foundations. But a recent collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation gave us the opportunity to experiment with opening up the grantmaking process itself ...

In 2017, with MacArthur support, we turned a team of 25 data scientists, coders, and designers loose on the entire set of 1,871 proposals and 1,700 accompanying videos that were submitted to the 100&Change competition. The result was the Solutions Bank, a free online resource allowing users to explore proposals by subject, population served, strategy, and relationship to one or more of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Read the full article about an open-data approach to transform grantmaking by Bradford K. Smith at Stanford Social Innovation Review.