This month, we’ve been joined by a new face in the office: a shiny, new member of our communications & research team. Welcome to the club, Sophia!
Sophia Maizel is a recent graduate from McGill university, with a major in Economics and a Minor in Finance. She is a big fan of social finance, and just recently was attending a workshop on Social Finance and Community Bonds held in Toronto at CSI. Her role here is to help us analyze the huge amount of data that our developers and research team have been gathering, and present it to you, dear reader, to show you some of the patterns in the sector and keep you and your organizations informed.
With the amount of data that is beginning to open up and become accessible, , a number of opportunities for non-profits exist to ask and answer important questions in their sector. Huge datasets on non-profit fundraising are coming online on the federal and the provincial level, as well as other datasets that Ajah actually gathers on social media use and web presence. The exciting part is that while these datasets are – for the moment – “siloed” and isolated, Ajah is now able to start combining and analyzing them together. By doing so, we can now examine important issues that were impossible (or extremely difficult) to study before now.
This information and analysis is incredibly valuable. Researchers have used it to spot fraudulent charities, fight human trafficking , and even track epidemics. While Sophia won’t be doing anything like that, she will be examining important aspects of financial data in the sector, such as new fundraising strategies and sources. Her inaugural post is on gaming and gambling activities as revenue sources for non-profits, and is coming out this week. Check back soon!
