connect 2017 • 33 T I M E T O R E F L E C T It’s great to have the opportunity to reflect on an incredibly busy two year period, since The Ireland Funds’ Board and executive team joined well-wishers from the sector in our new offices on Dublin’s Merrion Square to mark the launch of our company. A year later, they were back to mark the launch of our free public website benefacts.ie, and another year on, in April 2017, we celebrated yet another milestone with the launch of the first-ever analysis report on the entire Irish nonprofit sector. T H E D A T A B A S E O F I R I S H N O N P R O F I T S Our first task when we started was to create the Database of Irish Nonprofits – the most extensive and authoritative source of finan- cial, regulatory and governance data on Irish nonprofits. Irish nonprofits don’t have to take any action to be included in the database – Benefacts gets all the information it needs under Ire- land’s progressive Open Data regime, which means that financial accounts and other nonprofit disclosures are on the public record. Benefacts assembles this into a single repository which acts as the basis for benefacts.ie, where anyone can go for information about an Irish nonprofit that interests them. 30,000 people have visited the website since it launched last year - use it to look up some of The Ireland Funds’ grantees! H O W T H E D A T A I S M A K I N G A D I F F E R E N C E The website and the sector analysis report are two great ways of getting our data out to the general public, and already people are telling us they use it all the time to learn more about a charity that interests them, whether they want to make a gift, offer some of their time, or just want to know more about what’s going on in their part of the world. Benefacts Nonprofit Sector Analysis also plays an important role in telling the story of giving in Ireland, using live data from all of the major philanthropies for the first time. Our analysis shows that The Ireland Funds will be Ireland’s leading philanthropy after 2017, in terms of the scale of giving. But we’ve been busy on other less visible projects as well, for ex- ample by helping Ireland’s Central Statistics Office to improve its analysis of a sector that accounts about 10% of all organizations in the Republic of Ireland, attracting €5.5bn (or 8%) of government expenditure every year, and providing employment for about 8% of the workforce here. Data like this plays an essential role in feeding into public policy, and into the giving choices of donors, identifying areas of need, educating the public about where their tax euros are going, providing commentators and analysts for the first time with reliable evidence of trends We’ve also been working with policy-makers and donors in gov- ernment and in the philanthropy sector to develop a governance, risk and compliance service – Benefacts Analytics – which for the first time provides a due diligence tool to funders, allowing them to assess risk and anticipate challenges in the organizations they support.