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

人们普遍认为，志愿部门包含了非常多的组织，这些组织为英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、合作社和许多非正式的志愿组织和社区组织。我们从调查数据中了解到很多关于个人向慈善机构捐款的模式，以及关于志愿服务的模式。但在获得有关志愿组织的高质量数据方面，存在着很大的差距。而且有人认为，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认可，进而导致公众和自愿对它们的更高水平的支持。这个项目旨在回应这一需求，通过将慈善机构的信息与不同类型的非慈善民间社会组织(包括社区利益公司、合作社和互助组织，以及非营利公司担保有限公司)的信息汇集在一起，建立第一个关于第三部门组织人口的国家数据库。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联系起来。其中包括商业结构数据库(BSD)，这是中央政府关于组织的数据集，使我们能够识别BSD上的第三部门组织，并获得以前缺乏这些数据的第三部门组织的收入、员工和地理位置的数据。我们还将结合政府和NHS支出的公开数据，详细了解哪些第三部门组织参与了与政府合作提供公共服务，以及向全国各地的志愿组织发放赠款的信息。该项目将为研究第三部门组织的生存和发展、第三部门对提供公共服务的贡献、该国不同地区志愿部门活动的水平等开辟新的途径。通过这种方式，我们将使该部门的贡献更容易为利益攸关方所知。从战略上讲，我们的工作将提供一个重要的示范，说明管理数据在组织研究中的使用--这一领域迄今为止的大多数工作都集中在个人的管理数据上。这将导致第三部门信息库的质量发生阶段性变化，这将为决策和政策制定提供基础和可持续的资源。这将对资助者(如慈善基金会)、中央和地方政府、地方和地区志愿服务委员会(在当地维持这些组织)以及公共服务专员(如NHS)具有价值，因为NHS在很大程度上依赖于志愿部门提供服务。

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.