IMPROVING ACCESS TO AND USE OF ORGANISATION-LEVEL DATA ON THE THIRD SECTOR AND CIVIL SOCIETY

志愿部门被广泛认为包含大量的组织，为联合王国的福祉和社会凝聚力做出了巨大贡献。它包括慈善机构，社会企业，互助会，合作社以及许多不太正式的志愿和社区组织。我们从调查数据中了解了很多关于个人对慈善机构的捐赠模式，以及志愿服务的模式。但是，关于志愿组织的高质量数据的可用性存在很大差距。有人认为，更高质量的信息和证据将导致这些组织的贡献得到适当的承认，从而导致更高水平的公众和自愿支持他们。该项目旨在通过将有关慈善机构的信息与有关不同类型的非慈善民间社会组织的信息汇集在一起，创建第一个关于构成第三部门的组织人口的国家数据库，以满足这一需求（包括社区利益公司、合作社和互助社，和非营利担保有限公司）。然后，我们将把这个第三部门组织的国家数据库与其他各种数据集连接起来。它们包括商业结构数据库（BSD），这是一个关于组织的中央政府数据集，使我们能够在BSD上识别第三部门组织，并获得有关第三部门组织的收入，人员配备和地理位置的数据，这些数据以前一直缺乏。我们还将与政府和NHS支出的公开数据联系起来，详细了解哪些第三部门组织参与与政府合作提供公共服务，以及向全国各地志愿组织分配赠款的信息。 该项目将开辟新的研究途径，例如，第三部门组织的生存和发展;第三部门对公共服务的贡献;该国不同地区志愿部门活动的水平。通过这种方式，我们将使利益相关者更清楚地看到该部门的贡献。 在战略方面，我们的工作将提供一个重要的示范使用的行政数据的研究组织-一个领域，其中大多数工作迄今已集中在个人的行政数据。这将导致第三部门信息库的质量发生阶跃变化，为决策和政策制定提供基础性和可持续的资源。这将对资助者（如慈善基金会）、中央和地方政府、地方和区域志愿服务委员会（它们在当地支持这些组织）以及公共服务专员（如国民保健服务体系）（它们在很大程度上依赖志愿部门提供服务）具有价值。

The voluntary sector is widely acknowledged as containing very large numbers of organisations that make an enormous contribution to well-being and social cohesion in the UK. It encompasses charities, social enterprises, mutuals, cooperatives, and many less formal voluntary and community organisations. We know a great deal from survey data about patterns of individual giving to charities, and about patterns of volunteering. But there is a substantial gap in the availability of high-quality data about voluntary organisations. And it is argued that better-quality information and evidence would lead to the contribution of those organisations being properly recognised, leading in turn to higher levels of public and voluntary support for them. This project seeks to respond to this need by creating the first national database on the population of organisations forming the third sector through bringing together information about charities with information about different kinds of noncharitable civil society organisations (including Community Interest Companies, Co-operatives and Mutuals, and non-profit Companies Limited by Guarantee).Then we will link this national database of third sector organisations with various other datasets. They include the Business Structure Database (BSD), a central government dataset on organisations, enabling us to identify third sector organisations on the BSD and to obtain data on the income, staffing and geography of third sector organisations where this has been previously lacking. We will also link up with open data on government and NHS spending, to give a detailed picture of which third sector organisations are involved in partnering with government in the delivery of public services, and information on the distribution of grants to voluntary organisations across the country. The project will open up new avenues for research on, for example, the survival and growth of third sector organisations; the contribution of the third sector to public service delivery; the level of voluntary sector activity in different parts of the country. In this way, we will make the contribution of the sector much more visible to stakeholders. In strategic terms our work will provide an important demonstration of the uses of administrative data for research on organisations - a field in which most work to date has focussed on administrative data on individuals. It will result in a step-change in the quality of the information base about the third sector, which will provide a foundational and sustainable resource for decision making and policy development. This will be of value to funders (such as charitable foundations), central and local government, local and regional councils for voluntary service, which sustain these organisations locally, and commissioners of public services such as the NHS, which rely substantially on the voluntary sector to deliver services.