Benefacts - the Irish Nonprofits Project

Benefacts was an independent nonprofit that delivered a data infrastructure providing public transparency and digital accessibility to Ireland’s €14bn nonprofit sector between 2015 and 2022.

This website describes how the project was established, governed and financed. It provides access to its legacy assets: classified datasets and the processes used to produce them, provides analysis reports on the sector and its funders, and documents a range of knowledge services devised in cooperation with the sector, its funders and other stakeholders.

Before it was wound up in 2022, Benefacts used the regulatory, governance and financial disclosures of 20,000 Irish nonprofits to produce:

• A live database of every registered nonprofit in Ireland, updated daily 
• a base register of Irish nonprofits, freely published at no cost to and with no effort required from listed organisations
• a free searchable, sortable and filterable public website
• a trusted and otherwise unavailable quarterly data feed used by the Irish Central Statistics Office in the preparation of Ireland’s National Accounts
• a series of annual sector-wide analysis reports derived from full population data
• dozens of bespoke reports or datasets, commissioned by users in the public, private and nonprofit sectors
• a free public “Who Funds What” website providing audit-quality granular data on €7.7bn in State funding to the Irish nonprofit sector in 2020
• analyses of giving in Ireland by philanthropic foundations, individuals and households
• a customised data analytics tool for funders and policy-makers