greg-slater / charity_search

Purpose

This document describes how to use the charity search tool. This tool uses charity activity description data from the Charity Commission and grant description data from 360 Giving along with keyword lists for each to find charities which might make good partners for DataKind UK.

With the correct input files the python scripts will run each of the keyword matching processes and output the results in an interactive table which can be explored using additional filter fields (these filtered results can also be downloaded as a csv file), as well as full csv outputs which can be explored in more detail if necessary.

From the ~168k input charities and ~100k grants the output results will be all charities which meet the conditions below, with filter fields for positive or negative charity activity / grant keyword matches.

Conditions - final charities must have:

• An ‘activity’ description in the Charity Commission data

• Latest income data, with an income between £100,000 and £2,000,000

• A ‘cause’ which is not in the following:

  ‘General charitable purposes’, ‘Religious activities’, ‘Amateur sport’, ‘Animals’ or ‘Armed forces/emergency service efficiency’

Limitations

Keyword Match Results

While the results from the matching are certainly promising the intention is that this tool is developed further as it is used. As the results are interpreted, a user with domain knowledge will be able to add or remove keywords to search for, as well as adding negative keywords (which will cause a positive keyword to be ignored if it is also present in the text).

Error Handling

This is really a collection of scripts which can be run together, rather than a full python package or application and as such there is little error handling built in. Any problems are most likely to be caused by changes to file formats, so if issues are experienced as a first check always make sure the format of the input files is as originally supplied