Data Sharing Systems - What Has Been Tried? | Part 4 of 7

Despite how hard data sharing is, there have been many attempts to make it work. Here is a brief survey of some of these efforts:

• Regional Associations of Grantmakers (RAGs). When we started Common Grant Application, we visited many RAGs around the country that had created - or were working on - paper versions of common grant applications for their local grantmakers. To a person, every RAG president we spoke to said they would never do it again. They believed it was the right thing to do at the time, but found it time-consuming, frustrating, and nearly impossible to reach consensus. And even when they did produce something, it was rarely adopted widely and quickly reverted to grantmakers using their own forms.
• Cultural Data Project (CDP). We encountered this frequently in the early years of our business. Many grantmakers required their nonprofits to supply information from the CDP, which nonprofits managed themselves. Nonprofits generally found it complicated and time-consuming to maintain. They provided the information because it was required - not because they found it helpful or felt it benefited their applications.
• Foundation Center's hGrant and eGrant Reporting. This was a significant initiative, supported by major grantmakers, that gained real momentum around 2013–14. It focused less on application data and more on grantmaker transparency - specifically, who and what they were funding. Several GMS providers, including CGA, invested time and resources to support the required export formats. Web searches suggest the effort lost momentum after 2014, and we haven't been able to find any record of a formal conclusion.
• Technology Affinity Group (TAG) and GuideStar Simplify. Announced in 2014, this effort aimed to establish common data fields across the sector. It was started by TAG and later taken up by GuideStar (now Candid). It, too, quietly lost momentum.
• Candid (candid.org). They are now the most successful data sharing platform operating in the nonprofit sector, with annual operating revenues exceeding $40 million. Candid provides comprehensive information about grantmakers and nonprofits, drawn from IRS records and self-reported organizational data. Importantly, they keep the sources clearly separated - IRS data is identified as IRS data, self-reported data is identified as self-reported. They don't attempt to blend the two into a single authoritative record, which sidesteps many of the data authority and conflict resolution problems described in Part 3.
• Philanthropy Data Commons (PDC) (philanthropydatacommons.org). Launched in 2021 by the MacArthur Foundation and other funders, the PDC is a sector-wide initiative designed to improve how data flows between funders, grantees, and technology partners, using a consent-based platform. It is still in its relatively early stages.
• Others. There have been various other calls to action over the years - to simplify application forms, streamline reporting, or coordinate across grantmakers. We followed some of them closely at the time. We don't see any trace of most of them today.

What's striking about this history is the absence of formal post-mortems. There doesn't appear to be any public systematic effort to document what went wrong, what was learned, or why momentum stalled. The sector keeps reinventing the wheel without fully understanding why the last wheel broke. Why did these efforts lose steam? Did they produce any measurable improvement in the lives of nonprofits? And how can future efforts avoid the same fate?