Civil Society Systems.

What is a GuideStar?

A GuideStar system provides a detailed catalogue of reports on a country’s civil society organisations (CSOs) on a powerful but easy to use public website.

Each national GuideStar system is an independent not-for-profit civil society organisation, registered, managed and governed in its country of operation.

GSI works with civil society leaders in a country to develop these systems that enable organisations to communicate their work easily and effectively to national and international audiences.

They are also members of the GuideStar Alliance that together with GSI, are developing the world’s first and only source of comprehensive, cross-border civil society information.

GuideStar has been dubbed the “Bloomberg screen of philanthropy” (‘Virtue’s Intermediaries’, A Survey of Wealth and Philanthropy, The Economist, February 2006)

Why GuideStar?

In all countries, CSOs provide vital services to society. They provide citizens at all levels with a vehicle to organise and give expression to their aspirations for their communities, their countries and the world.

Transparency and information are crucial to ensure that the vital work of this sector is known, enabled, effective and accountable.

We believe that GuideStar systems provide the framework necessary to support and promote these interactions.

A GuideStar:

• aggregates comprehensive information about all Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) within a country;

• provides an online reporting venue for CSOs to supplement data acquired from government sources;

• rationalises and streamlines the reporting and acquisition of organisations’ information;

• presents reports on all CSOs to the world through a free public web site;

• provides aggregate data to policy makers and researchers; and

• maintains an open information/technology platform to enable provision of value-added services by intermediaries.

A GuideStar does not:

• impose its own values to assess worthiness of CSOs;

• accredit CSOs;

• provide independent reports of CSOs (all information is self-reported by the organisation);

• provide analysis of CSO individual or collective activity (all information is electronically generated); or

• offer an online giving system (although it supports such systems).

Instead a GuideStar leaves:

• judgments of a citizen organisation’s worthiness to individuals and third party institutions;

• research about citizen organisations to researchers;

• applications of codes or other accreditation standards to appropriate agencies; and

• provision of value added services for specific audiences to a range of independent providers.

Sub sections for this page:
GSI Activities : What is a GuideStar? : Key Benefits : Engagement process

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