BRIDGE is a system that assigns nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), NGO programs and projects, and other entities in the social sector with a unique global identifier, a “numerical fingerprint” for non-profits.
Because of the exceptional nature of the project, in which we worked with four Clients, our role in BRIDGE was, in some respects, different from the typical one. But let’s start from the beginning.
In the first phase of the project Future Processing was responsible for creating a complete system that was able to deduplicate data on the approximately 3.3 million non-profit organisations provided by the Core Team Members (CTMs).
As part of the project, the vast majority of NGOs (97.4 percent) were assigned a unique identifier: a BRIDGE ID. In total, we’ve identified approximately 540,000 duplicates, resulting in 2.7 million BRIDGE IDs in the system. The deduplication engine has been fine-tuned to perform as best as possible for NGOs.
It was our pleasure working with the Future Processing team. We found their engineers to be technically proficient, engaging, and open to new ideas. The Future Processing team did an outstanding job managing the project and the final product met all of our expectations. We would definitely work with Future Processing again and would recommend them to others as well.
Shane T. Ward, GuideStar International
The BRIDGE project has now launched its lookup tool. With the BRIDGE database now publically accessible and around 3 million entities assigned their unique IDs, transparency within the sector has already increased substantially. While original plans were focused on better understanding the flow of philanthropic funding, a wide range of end users are already using BRIDGE for a variety of purposes.
Fundamentally, before BRIDGE, there was no basic building block from which to create this information system.