A quick post from me here. Yesterday, the Cabinet Office released details of the first organisations to be funded by the £100m Transition Fund. The Cabinet Office says the money will:
“fund the crucial changes that these organisations need to make to take advantage of the new opportunities available to them from opening up public sector contracts; these changes may include restructuring, scaling up or merging or diversifying income streams.”
I’ll leave it to others to comment on the pros and cons of the fund, but from a research perspective it’s really interesting for us to be able to see which organisations are funded. We can then compare the funded organisations to charities as a whole – are the organisations that are funded typical of the organisations targeted by the fund initially? Is the fund reaching the most vulnerable? Are there gaps in provision?
Fortunately, the Cabinet Office did publish details of the first 18 organisations to receive funding. They published their name, location and the amount of the funding.
But for this data to be really useful – particularly when many more than 18 organisations are funded – it would be great to have a unique, transferable identifier for the organisations.
The table does tell us the name of the organisation, but in many cases this is not enough. Sometimes organisations are known by working names, or by acronyms. Sometimes a name is spelt differently, or leaves out words from the “official” registered name.
We do have a unique identifier for charities – their charity registration number. This number, issued by the Charity Commission, is used as an ID in the register of charities, and can be found in the charity’s annual accounts and should also be on their website.
It’s slightly unfair to pick on this one example, and it is great that the Cabinet Office is being open about who it funds. But the list could be even more useful if they also included a charity number for each of the charities on the list. They could also publish later lists (which will be longer) in a useful and transferable format, such as CSV.
To help them along, I’ve reproduced the list of charities below with the addition of their Charity Register Number. You can click on the number to take you to their record on the Register of Charities, to find out more about what they do.
| Organisation | Location | Grant | Charity Number |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bede House Association | London, SE16 | £198,899 | 303199 |
| Shire Training Workshops Limited | Stroud, Gloucestershire | £89,570 | 285834 |
| Isle of Wight Law Centre Limited | Newport, Isle of Wight | £61,941 | 1102853 |
| Somerset Youth Volunteering Network | Glastonbury, Somerset | £97,000 | 1096507 |
| Vital Regeneration | London, NW8 | £146,300 | 1110882 |
| Disability Action In Islington | London, N1 | £74,734 | 1055692 |
| Living Options Devon | Exeter, Devon | £89,454 | 1102489 |
| Domestic Violence Integrated Response Project | Leicester | £103,000 | 1122344 |
| Building Futures East | Newcastle upon Tyne, Tyne and Wear | £151,000 | 1125555 |
| Umbrella | Derby | £35,000 | 700884 |
| Middlesbrough Environment City Trust Limited | Middlesbrough, Cleveland | £15,130 | 1070131 |
| Headway Devon | Exeter, Devon | £50,000 | 1097870 |
| Islington People’s Rights | London, N7 | £76,000 | 1077688 |
| Headliners (UK) | London, E1 | £151,329 | 1043300 |
| SkyWay Charity | London, E2 | £151,000 | 1093239 |
| Olmec | London, EC2A | £120,000 | 1100007 |
| Incest and Sexual Abuse Survivors | Newark, Nottinghamshire | £26,800 | 1076138 |
| North Yorkshire Youth Limited | Thirsk, North Yorkshire | £107,062 | 1116521 |
David Kane was formerly NCVO’s Senior Research Officer. He discusses open data and emerging trends in the voluntary and community sector and wider civil society. 
