The Foundation Center has announced the launch of Foundation Stats, an online tool that provides free and open access to data on the U.S. foundation community.

The Web-based platform enables users to generate custom tables and charts illustrating the size, scope, and giving priorities of the nearly eighty-two thousand independent, corporate, community, and grantmaking operating foundations in the United States. It also offers access to an application programming interface (API) that Web developers can use to extract data for their own uses under a Creative Commons license.

In the "Foundations" section of the tool, users will find basic financial data on foundations organized by type, location, and fiscal year. The "Grants" section — which includes grants made by the top thousand foundations in the U.S. — allows data to be filtered by subject area or population group served as well as the geographic location of recipients. Users can generate their own tables, charts, and graphs to show trends over time, and all custom results can be downloaded for use in spreadsheets.

"Foundation Stats allows grantmakers, nonprofit professionals, researchers, and journalists to get exactly the foundation data they need," said Foundation Center president Bradford K. Smith. "It represents a huge leap forward in opening up data on philanthropy and paves the way for the development of innovative applications of the type that only open data makes possible."

"This is the first time that aggregate statistics on foundation funding have been made available as an online data feed," said Lawrence T. McGill, the Foundation Center's vice president for research. "By making it easy for others to use this information, the API extends the potential of the data to inform public and social sector decision making."