Major upgrade to donations

We’ve gone through a major upgrade to our Donations gadgets – they are now faster and clearer and have new ways of displaying the data.

We did make one huge decision on the way. In our old Donations gadgets we cleaned up some of the data. This had the advantage of getting rid of some of the background noise created because there are no rules about how the data is originally data-entered (so for example, the Australian Labor Party can appear as “Australian Labor Party” or “ALP” or “A.L.P.” or “Australian LP” or….). The problem with our approach is that we couldn’t catch all the possible permutations and sometimes caught the wrong ones. So we’re not doing that any more.

Instead we’ve made it so the data can be searched. That allows the user to make their own decisions about what they want to see and what they consider accurate.

Neither approach is perfect – if you want perfection the whole donations system need to be revised. And we can tell you how we’d do it.

In the meantime there’s a lot of donations data to drill into to see where the rivers of money go.