New Tool Helps Foundations Share Data

October 19, 2014 | Read Time: 1 minute

The Walter & Elise Haas Fund has created a tool to help foundations share information about the grants they award.

Like many grant makers, the San Francisco philanthropy uses its own system for recording, tracking, and publishing grants online. It wanted to share that information with the Foundation Center’s open-data initiative, the Reporting Commitment, but doing so proved costly and technically challenging.

So the Haas Fund developed Open hGrant for WordPress, a plug-in that lets foundations publish on their websites grant information from any grants-management database and share it with the Foundation Center.

“Many of us talk about increasing transparency, but this is something more,” Pamela David, the fund’s executive director, said in a statement.

“This is about sharing practical tools with our peers so we can foster effective collaboration, strategic planning, and engagement across the philanthropic sector.”

Using the new tool, the Haas Fund is now the 19th foundation to join the Reporting Commitment.

For more information: Go to wordpress.org/plugins/wp-hgrant.

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NICOLE WALLACE

Features Editor

Nicole Wallace is features editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy. She has written about innovation in the nonprofit world, charities’ use of data to improve their work and to boost fundraising, advanced technologies for social good, and hybrid efforts at the intersection of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, such as social enterprise and impact investing.Nicole spearheaded the Chronicle’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts on the Gulf Coast and reported from India on the role of philanthropy in rebuilding after the South Asian tsunami. She started at the Chronicle in 1996 as an editorial assistant compiling The Nonprofit Handbook.Before joining the Chronicle, Nicole worked at the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs and served in the inaugural class of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps.A native of Columbia, Pa., she holds a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University.