As of August 2020, the BRIDGE project has been shut down and will not be issuing new numbers or updates to data.

Background

The goal of the Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities (BRIDGE) project was to dramatically enhance how data relating to the activities of nonprofit organizational entities worldwide can be collected, analyzed, and productively used. This was to be achieved by creating a globally accessible database of uniquely identified entities (each tagged with a BRIDGE ID and a limited amount of public data) and the various necessary mechanisms to support the creation and maintenance of that system.

The data used to initially create this system was pulled from the extensive databases of the founding partners: GlobalGiving, TechSoup Global, GuideStar, and Foundation Center (the latter two have merged and are now called Candid). Initial success was to be measured by enabling data interoperability using the BRIDGE number between the founding partners.

A lot has changed since the project was launched in 2012. While the two remaining BRIDGE partners (GlobalGiving and Candid) are still committed to using and promoting unique identifiers, we have made the difficult decision to sunset the BRIDGE. The numbering system and web servers will cease operating in August 2020.

The BRIDGE system was envisioned to be sustainable, appropriately governed, and scalable world-wide. A dues-based membership model was adopted in an attempt to make the BRIDGE system sustainable. However, several challenges emerged that led to our decision to close the BRIDGE system permanently.

Challenges

• There was little success in attracting dues-based members. There was some interest in using the BRIDGE ID and its associated data as an open data resource, by not for pay.
• Beyond the original partners, we found few organizations and companies that wanted to use the BRIDGE ID for data interoperability to keep databases synchronized and current.
• It was hard to penetrate the market for unique organizational identifiers among established and well-funded vendors such as LEI, DUNNS, and a large number of country-based identification systems world-wide.
• The level of manual effort necessary to curate and deduplicate country-based organizational data internationally far exceed our funding expectations and challenged our sustainability.

Thank You

Thank you to the teams at Candid, GlobalGiving, and TechSoup Global for their efforts on the BRIDGE project over the years, as well as the development team at Future Processing. The development of the BRIDGE system was funded by generous grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Google Inc.

Next Steps

If you are looking for up-to-date information about nonprofit organizations, please review the product offering of Candid and GlobalGiving.

If you are interested in the historical data archives of BRIDGE which are no longer maintained or updated, you can access them here. They are provided in the interest of transparency and are provided “as-is” without any support.