Just picked this up off of Techcrunch… I love any idea that forces nonprofits to compare their results to others in their field. It’s dovetails transparency and accountability quite nicely. So what Swivel does is allow people to upload data to their site not merely to store it but to use for data analysis. This could conceivably allow donors and clients to actually see what a nonprofit does (should they actually have the data for this).
I’d like to point out that if there was such a thing as a nonprofit social service data standard, then it would be remarkably easy for people to do these comparisons. That said, how wicked would it be for people who used the same case management systems to do data dumps and upload it to Swivel? Let’s say my org (which uses Foothold Technology’s AWARDS database) and another org which uses that same application does a simple .CSV dump of their data. We upload the dumps independently of one another to swivel. We wouldn’t need a Charity Navigator or Guidestar anymore to justify our expenses. All our work would be up there for everyone to see and to slice and dice as necessary.
Of course, the devil is in the details hehe. And who knows how’s snappy their apps are going to be or how detailed their graphs are going to be? Swivel is such a great idea and I really hope it takes off.
UPDATE: Swivel is now up! (And under heavy server load)
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