BRIDGE project – our contribution to revolutionise information sharing in the global social sector
The Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities (BRIDGE) is a new collaborative project that aims to revolutionise information sharing, in order to better understand the flows of philanthropic dollars and enhance transparency and effectiveness in the global social sector.
BRIDGE is a system that assigns nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), NGO programs and projects, and other entities in the social sector with a unique global identifier, a “numerical fingerprint” for non-profits.
Because of the exceptional nature of the project, in which we worked with four Clients, our role in BRIDGE was, in some respects, different from the typical one. But let’s start from the beginning.
It was our pleasure working with the Future Processing team. We found their engineers to be technically proficient, engaging, and open to new ideas. The Future Processing team did an outstanding job managing the project and the final product met all of our expectations. We would definitely work with Future Processing again and would recommend them to others as well – Shane T. Ward, GuideStar International
In the first phase of the project Future Processing was responsible for creating a complete system that was able to deduplicate data on the approximately 3.3 million non-profit organisations provided by the Core Team Members (CTMs).
As part of the project, the vast majority of NGOs (97.4 percent) were assigned a unique identifier: a BRIDGE ID. In total, we’ve identified approximately 540,000 duplicates, resulting in 2.7 million BRIDGE IDs in the system. The deduplication engine has been fine-tuned to perform as best as possible for NGOs.
We are now in the second phase of the project. Currently, BRIDGE can help CTMs exchange information efficiently and improve communication about NGOs.
The main stakeholders in the project are four organisations from the non-profit sector: GlobalGiving, GuideStar International, Foundation Center, and TechSoup Global. The organisations often closely cooperate; each one processes the data on NGOs to some degree.
