2016 Grant Applicants

Listed below are the applicants to the grant program 2016 cycle who agreed to share details about their proposed projects with the Digital Impact community and public at large. Digital Impact has also shared an interactive data visualization of these projects. Thank you to all who applied!

Afterschool Alliance
Building Youth Programs’ Ability to Use Public Data: Improving Needs Assessments to Build Quality
“This comprehensive toolkit helps youth service programs to tailor their services by incorporating open source data about community needs into their program plans.”

AIRS
Standardizing Resource Data APIs
“We will develop an open specification for resource directory APIs — enabling institutions to publish interoperable data about the health, human, and social services available to people in need.”

Beehive
Generate IATI Compliant Aid Activity Dataset Needed for the Research and Development of Humanitarian Financing Applications
“This project will generate a case study dataset vitally needed to demonstrate how aid activity data reported by humanitarian organizations can power innovative humanitarian crowdfunding applications.”

Bellwether Education Partners
Defining Standards for Student Achievement Data in Juvenile Justice Facilities
“There is no accurate student achievement data for kids who attend school while incarcerated.  We can fix that by articulating a national standard for data collection, analysis, and reporting.”

Boys & Girls Clubs of the Sequoias
Lea Conmigo Farmersville (Read With Me Farmersville)
Funding is requested to map the collective impact of community partners on literacy outcomes in a high poverty, low literacy community so that other communities struggling with literacy can replicate.

Bread for the City (on behalf of DC PACT)
Open Access Advocate
Bread for the City, a founding partner of the District of Columbia Positive Accountable Community Transformation (DC PACT), will create an innovative, single-shared data system across agencies.

Catalogue for Philanthropy
Systematizing to Promote Philanthropy
To prepare for national dissemination the first systematic (patented) presentation of potentially all U.S. charities’ websites, searchable by name, field, location, size, age and demographics served.

Central New York Community Foundation
An Open Source Toolkit for Data-Driven Nonprofits
“We will create a set of open-source tools and tutorials that empower nonprofits and public organizations to utilize performance data for impact evaluations and dissemination of performance information.”

Charity Navigator
Nonprofit Self-Assessment Tool
“Build the prototype for a self-assessment tool nonprofits can use to calculate evaluations, submit impact data, and improve financial and governance scores for a provisional Charity Navigator rating.”

Child Health Investment Partnership (CHIP) of Roanoke Valley
Research 101 for Non-Profits
“Research 101 for Non-Profits will develop a curriculum focused on teaching research skills & the importance of collecting, recording and managing data to advance non-profit fundraising and management.”

Civic Hall Labs
Open Resource Directory Data Business Modeling
“Construct and validate a sustainable business model by which an organization can recoup the costs of maintaining open data about the health, human, and social services available in its community.”

College Access Now (CAN)
Beyond Demographics: Predictive Analytics and Customized Student Supports
“CAN proposes to develop a data-driven and qualitatively informed analytic process that will enable us to develop and provide customized student supports to assist in successful degree completion.”

Columbus Community Center
Employer’s Perceptions Discovery
“We will investigate potential employers’ perceptions of workers with disabilities to inform our focused training/employment program that addresses the needs and skills of individuals with autism.”

Community Resource Exchange
Harnessing Open Data as a Tool for Good
“This project will continue recent research into Open Data and will develop and field test a user-informed guide that supports nonprofit decision makers in the use of Open Data as planning tool.”

Connecticut Data Collaborative
The CTData Academy
“The CTData Academy is a public education initiative designed to help state agencies, nonprofits and community groups ask good questions to collect good information to use in making great decisions.”

DataArts
Feasibility Study on Operationalizing Arts Workforce Demographics Tool for Other Nonprofit Sectors
“To investigate the feasibility of operationalizing an existing workforce demographic collection tool initially developed by DataArts for arts and cultural nonprofits, across the nonprofit sector.”

Days for Girls International
METRIC
M&E Toolkit Revealing Insights for Civil Society fills a critical gap in data collection & analysis with accessible, adaptable tools to be utilized across sectors & organizations both large and small.

DigitalC
Ohio Philanthropy Impact Project
Coordinating data among small local philanthropy to support greater transparency and improve community impact.

DOORWAYS
Good Data for Better Health
“DOORWAYS will assess/distribute comprehensive data from rural/urban service providers to increase the body of knowledge about the geographic, social & cultural differences affecting HIV/AIDS service.”

Downtown Streets Team
“Data Ending Homelessness” Offline Coordinated Entry Tool
“We want to develop a Progressive Web App that allows you to collect data from forms in a coordinated entry system; that works offline and on all devices. See mockup here: http://imgur.com/lmRyB5C .

Drexel University
Nonprofit Ecosystem Research and Visualization
“We will help the sector understand and visualize critical data on the breadth and reach of nonprofits and their communities, creating opportunities for new connections, collaborations, and donors.”

Eastern Illinois University
Reducing Disease Burden Through Predictive Modeling – A Case Study
“Large public data sets will be used to establish the vulnerability of a geographic area for a given outcome – using neighborhood characteristics to predict HIV status and outcomes for a population.”

Engagement Lab at Emerson College, MIT Center for Civic Media, & TNB Labs
NonProfit.Databasic.io: A Data Literacy Toolkit for Non-profit Organizations
“We plan to create a data literacy toolkit for nonprofit organizations by customizing our existing technology, integrating relevant data, creating targeted howtos and running workshops with nonprofits.”

Fab Lab San Diego
Mapping & Visualizing Informal Education Opportunities & Gaps in the City of San Diego
“We’re creating a open searchable citywide database that maps informal education access points, builds open data standards for informal education, and includes a rubric to assess program quality.”

Family Independence Initiative
Initiative Score
“The Initiative Score is an alternative credit-underwriting algorithm that accounts for low-income families financial progress, as well as education, health and social capital initiatives.”

First 5 FUNdamentals
Measuring Community Success: an innovative approach to cross sector data collection about family wellbeing
“Landscape analysis of existing data which measures population level protective factors that ensure child and family wellbeing.”

GreatNonprofits
Informed Giving Through Rapid Community Surveys
“This grant will fund the testing of whether relevant, timely, data about local needs will drive potential donors to learn about nonprofits that address these issues.”

Guerrilla Cartography
Water: An Atlas
“Water: An Atlas is a project of Guerrilla Cartography that employs crowdsourcing data and cartographic visualizations as a new paradigm in atlas creation and community knowledge-caching.”

Hampshire College
Good Food Metrics
“Good Food Metrics responds to the need for social enterprises and funders to have a common platform and curated metrics for effectively assessing progress in sustainable food and agriculture.”

HandsOn Central California
Serve Fresno Mobile App
“We’ll create a city wide mobile App to promote, personalize, monitor, and evaluate Fresno volunteering; data mining algorithms will be developed to recommend volunteers and CBOs bi-directionally.”

Hopeworks N Camden & Community Planning and Advocacy Council (CPAC)
Camden County Resource Compass
“The Resource Compass provides access to social services across the county, and relevant, real-time, and scalable data to nonprofits about the utilization of their services.”

HQ
YOUTHfull Data Project
“This project develops equitable data collect with homeless youth via internal process & a web app that empowers & connects them to services, & helps our community understand & respond to their needs.”

Improve International
Digitizing Development Data
“We seek a low-cost way to digitize monitoring data that have been captured on paper so that this information becomes actionable for development organizations, their customers, and governments.”

Improve International & The New School Atlanta
Know Your H2O
“Students will use the power of data to encourage better decision making about water at the consumer and service provider levels.”

Indiana Association for Community Economic Development (IACED)
IACED Outcomes Platform
“The Indiana Association for Community Economic Development proposes to develop an Outcomes Platform – a cloud-based data collection, tracking and reporting system – to document nonprofit member impact.”

InterAction
NGO Aid Map
“NGO Aid Map is a platform that shows InterAction members’ project data visually and interactively, and is designed to increase the amount of public data about INGOs and their in-country work.”

Kalamazoo Literacy Council
Kalamazoo County Adult Literacy Effective Measures Project
“The Kalamazoo County Adult Literacy Effective Measures Project will strengthen data collection and analysis practices to deliver better instruction and service outcomes for learners in the region.”

Knoxville Leadership Foundation
Nonprofit Organization Self-Assessment Tool
“Knoxville Leadership Foundation requests $50,000 to bring online an in-depth capacity building self-assessment tool accessible to nonprofits across the country.”

Lakeview Pantry
Lakeview Pantry Hunger Research
“Lakeview Pantry’s goal is to update client information forms to facilitate better data collection, and to then analyze that data in order to understand the needs and lived realities of our clients.”

LISC Twin Cities
Frictionless Data Gathering and Outcome Measurement
“Mobile app NP orgs use to gather program data to measure outcome performance. Customizable forms (like SurveyMonkey) makes it easy, universal, & tailored to each org’s uniqueness. Shared reporting.”

Media Mobilizing Project
Bad Data In: Communities Build Best Practice Database and Toolkit on Predictive Algorithmic Risk Assessment in Pretrial Detention
“Courts are using algorithms to release “low-risk” defendants – we’ll study racial bias in these tools, best practices in implementation, and disseminate results through a robust civil rights network.”

Metrics for Management
Standardizing Maternal Health Quality Measures, Data, and Visualizations
“Develop & pilot standardized prototype metric of maternal health quality, including a review of quality measures & integration with leading global health management information system.”

Netcentric Campaigns
AI for Advocacy. Phase One Organizing
“Understanding what scattered public data offers social causes, we will convene experts, design protocols and pilots using Artificial Intelligence to synthesize data for the advocacy community.”

NetHope
A Flexible Information Management System for Humanitarian Emergency Telecommunications
“An open-sourced platform for humanitarian organizations to effectively receive and transmit operational information in disconnected, disaster environments.”

New Mexico School for the Blind and Visually Impaired Foundation
Babies Count
“Babies Count is a national database that is designed to provide demographic and epidemiological data for children ages birth-three in the field of blindness/visual impairment.”

Northern Illinois University
Good Data Northern Illinois
“Survey design and data collection to create a searchable database on the state of the nonprofit sector in DeKalb County, IL, as pilot project to expand to surrounding counties in Northern Illinois.”

Powered by Data & Tides Canada Foundation
Hacking inertia: how to incentivize publishing of open data by American funders
“This project uses city-specific applications to empower local leaders in 4 US cities to mobilize funders to publish open, standardized grant data — thereby unlocking the raw materials for innovation.”

President and Fellows of Harvard College / Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health
The Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative
“Developing a standardized pre-deployment humanitarian risk analysis and ethics evaluation framework and checklist for data collection, processing, and analysis platforms and methods.”

Princeton University
“Amazon for Poverty”: Technology and data sharing among nonprofit social service organizations
“In a mixed-methods community study of anti-poverty organizations, this project seeks to examine how the automation and sharing of data in the nonprofit sector impacts the quality of social services.”

Public Science
System Designer (SYD)
“A web-based computer simulation tool that unpacks biases in decision-making, educates on the importance of complex systems thinking, and ultimately helps to design better economic and policy systems.”

RaiseYou
Making a Measurable Difference
“RaiseYou is the first site where donors can search charitable gifts with prices from multiple charities in one location, providing donors with the ability to measure the return on their donations.”

Rare Genomics Institute
Rare Disease Commons (RDC)
“An interactive platform for clinicians and families of children with rare diseases to share medical information to help facilitate and expedite diagnoses for current and future patients.”

Sacramento Region Community Foundation
BIG Day of Giving
“We will share new information about donors, how they behaved on a new giving platform, what impacts that behavior had on the nonprofit sector and how digital data and technology were influential.”

San Francisco Public Press
Civic Radar: Open Data Mining, Monitoring and Alerting for Local Newsrooms
“We will show how a local newsroom with little technical or programming knowledge can use an off-the-shelf big data tool to mine city open datasets to produce civic and accountability journalism.”

SEED SPOT
Mapping the Impact
“Identify gaps that surround entrepreneurs in metro areas. Produce a methodology for a repeatable framework of key indicators to understand the health and performance of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

SideWalk
Coordinated Entry – Electronic Intake Process
“SideWalk will create an electronic intake and assessment process for homeless individuals in Thurston County so there is 24/7 access to services, and data is shareable across human service agencies.”

SIMLab, The Engine Room, Center for Democracy & Technology, & FPF Education and Innovation Foundation
Good Data Collaborative
“The Good Data Collaborative seeks to identify gaps in resources to assist civil society in using data responsibly through distinct activities: a landscape assessment of existing tools and resources, as well as academic literature; a consultation with key stakeholders and current and potential users of the resources; and a redesigned, central repository of resources to help them address responsible data challenges in their work.”

The Civic Canopy
Civic Network
“The Civic Network will do for collaboration what Amazon did for shopping—creating a one-stop tool for individuals, organizations, and networks to use to address complex and pressing social issues.”

The Governance Lab/National Center for Civic Innovation
Data Labs: applying the model in other contexts
“Data Labs is a model for evaluating the effectiveness of social programs using administrative data—this project will investigate how and where it can be replicated and aim to initiate pilots.”

The Ihangane Project
Using Data and Technology to Inspire Healthy Mothers & Infants
“We are creating a low-cost, quality-driven, health care worker-centered electronic medical record designed for replication throughout East Africa to improve health outcomes for mothers and babies.”

The Piton Foundation
A New Standard for Built Environment Databases: A Metro Denver Pilot
“An effort to leverage a parcel-level database platform that supports decision making for policy makers, nonprofits and foundations related to affordable housing and workforce development initiatives.”

The Trust for the Americas & Organization of American States
Data culture and information management in non-profits
“Pilot initiative to strengthen information management and data collection in non-profit organizations through an Indicator Management Platform (IMP). Improve culture of data reporting in social sector.”

The Women’s Foundation of California
The California Women’s Well-Being Index
“The California Women’s Well-Being Index is an interactive map of 30 distinct and interrelated indicators of inequity that policymakers and advocates can use to craft policy solutions for progress.”

UCLA
Interactions Analytics Among Diverse STEM Students in Community Colleges
“We will create an online portal that connects diverse community college STEM students with upper-level undergrad and grad student mentors, and study their network interactions via learning analytics.”

UC Santa Cruz
The philanthropic sharing economy: enabling the donation of goods at scale
“Understand principles for facilitating large-scale donation of goods from individuals to NGOs, and deploy a platform providing welcome packages for the 85,000 refugees arriving in the US yearly.”

United Way of the Quad Cities Area
Quad Cities Data Warehouse
“We will use a FERPA-compliant database of individual-level, identified student academic performance data to allow local funders to track outcomes for programs, even across a state boundary.”

University of Texas at Austin
College & Career Counseling AI System
“This project tests the effects of personalized career and college counseling for high school students delivered by a system of text messages and professional counseling.”

Washington University
Improving the spread, usability and sustainability of the taxonomy of human services
“A taxonomy of 10,000 human services has evolved over 30 years with input from and use by thousands of professionals; we aim to make it work just as well for public users in an open, accessible world.”

WI Balance of State Continuum of Care
Successful Targeting of Shelter Diversion to Persons At-Risk of Homelessness
“This project aims to determine which clients can be successful diverted from homelessness by implementing diversion for newly homeless clients presenting for shelter.”

Women Against Abuse, Inc.
Identifying and Sharing Data to Improve Philadelphia’s Response to Domestic Violence
“This project will create the first system of data collection measures across city systems and health and human service organizations in order to, address and mitigate domestic violence in Philadelphia.”

YCore
Millennials and Nonprofits: the Next Generation of Data
“YCore is educating a new generation in nonprofit data competency and giving them the knowledge, experience, and framework to unlock data capacity for local nonprofits.”