The Foundation Center, a source of information about philanthropy, launched Foundation Stats (http://data.foundationcenter.org), an online tool that provides free and open access to data on nearly 82,000 independent, corporate, community and grantmaking operating foundations. Users can explore foundations’ basic financial data by organization type, location and fiscal year. The grants section, based on giving by the top 1,000 U.S. foundations, allows users to filter data by recipients’ geographic location and by subject area or population group served.

 

Users also can generate their own tables, charts and graphs to show trends over time, and all custom results can be downloaded for use in spreadsheets. And the tool includes an application programming interface so Web developers can freely extract multiple years of aggregate-level statistics for their own use.