From April 2017 researchers from the Centre for Nonprofit Sector Research located at the Faculty of Economics and Administration of Masaryk University Brno worked on a unique three-year project of an Interactive Map of the Nonprofit Sector. The objective of the project was to provide a wide range of up-to-date information on various types of organisations in the nongovernmental nonprofit sector in the Czech Republic via a user-friendly information portal in an attractive visual form. Fully automated analytic tools allow users to segment, aggregate, and analyse verified data without manual tracing in frequently poorly organised state databases and registers.
Through the provision of information and data, the portal provides clear insight into the representation of nonprofit organizations in both the scope of their activities and the sub-sectors in which they operate, thus bringing intelligible information to the general public as well as to the public sector or the nonprofit sector itself. The interactive map answers questions like what nonprofit organizations really do, how they earn money and how they manage it, and what the area is of their engagement in specific sub-sectors. Dynamic outputs of the project can be used, for example, to identify and approach a potential partner, to search for a service provider, or to make decisions on where to donate money. In particular, it can also support evidence-based decision-making in the distribution of public resources.
The project was supported by the European Social Fund programme and it was implemented under the supervision Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic.
The project was completed in March 2020, but the team still continues to update databases and improve the automated processes.