Giving Compass' Take:

• Independent Sector's Dan Cardinali interviews Jacob Harold of Candid about the organization's goal consolidating and organization information about the social sector.

• Candid's goal is to connect people who want to change the world with the resources they need. In an ideal world, how would changemakers access information? What partners could collaborate to realize this goal?

• To learn more about collective impact, click here.


Foundation Center and GuideStar [recently] joined forces to become a brand new nonprofit entity known as Candid ... [I]t’s quite a feat to have completed a merger on this scale, bringing together more than 85 years of combined expertise and experience.

After giving the dust some time to settle, [Independent Sector] President and CEO Dan Cardinali reached out to Jacob Harold, executive vice president at Candid, to find out more about the history and the future of this historic pairing.

Dan Cardinali: Tell me how all this started? What was the need in the infrastructure space that got you thinking about a merger?

Jacob Harold: Around the world there are millions of organizations trying to do good. But as a field we can’t clearly say who is doing what, where ... It’s too hard to learn from each other. It’s too hard to collaborate. It’s too hard to make good giving decisions.

There’s another gap that makes this even harder: the cultural chasm between nonprofits and foundations. Here in the US, we’ve only reinforced that gap by having grantmaker information in one place and nonprofit information in another. Data systems are even more fragmented around the world.

We think Candid can help bridge these gaps.

DC: [I]n the [long] term, what changes systematically to make the sector stronger? What’s your blue-sky scenario?

JH: Long-term planning for Candid must involve the field as a whole. We can’t assume that we alone know what is best for the entire social sector. Over the next year we’ll be running a “listening tour” to do exactly that: listen. So we’re not going to release any definitive long-term plans until we’ve had a chance to listen, think, and listen so more.

Read the full article about bridging the nonprofit knowledge gap at independentsector.org