CLASSIE is a landmark Our Community Innovation Lab initiative that enables systematic classification of social sector initiatives and entities: a social sector taxonomy for Australia and New Zealand.

Based on the well-respected and widely used Philanthropy Classification System, an initiative of the US organisation Candid (formerly Foundation Center), its adaptation to Australia and New Zealand drew on deep input from more than 50 subject matter experts, with management and oversight by Our Community.

CLASSIE is used in Our Community enterprises, including SmartyGrants, Funding Centre and GiveNow, and external systems including the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC)'s Charity Register, the Centre for Social Impact's Amplify initiative, and on the ChangePath charity information website.

Contents

• Why
• Who
• How we got here
• Why use CLASSIE?
• CLASSIE in detail
• CLASSIEfier (auto-classification)

Why

This is the most exciting time in history for policy-makers, not-for-profit practitioners, grantmakers and other change-makers. New tools provide us with opportunities for streamlining, acceleration, and smarter, more evidence-driven practice.

However, despite a natural tendency among social sector organisations towards collegiality and collective action, most initiatives have up to now remained siloed - lessons hidden, or not widely shared. This has to change.

We want to get government grantmakers, philanthropists, not-for-profit organisations, businesses, social investors, donors - anyone who's contributing money, time or other forms of support to create change - to start speaking the same language. It's the first crucial step in the march towards evidence-based practice and accelerated outcomes.

The development of CLASSIE builds upon Our Community's two decades of work with grantmakers and not-for-profits, and our extensive investigations of domestic and international innovations in government and philanthropic grantmaking.

CLASSIE is used across Our Community platforms including GiveNow, GoodJobs, the Funding Centre's EasyGrants Database, the Institute of Community Directors Australia's Board Matching Service, and our grants management platform, SmartyGrants.

It is also used by the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC) to help charities classify their programs.

All of these services involve collecting information from social-change organisations about who they are and what they do. Joining them up provides an unprecedented opportunity for the tens of thousands of not-for-profit organisations and grantmakers who are working to create positive social change. With the implementation of CLASSIE, and the cooperation of our partners, Our Community is spearheading the generation of data-backed evidence and powerful insights that have never been available before.

Who

This project is being driven by Our Community, a social enterprise that provides information, infrastructure, connections, tools and analysis that enable government and other change agents to build stronger communities.

In developing CLASSIE, Our Community's Innovation Lab has been hugely assisted by Candid, which provided access to its open-source PCS, and advice and assistance as we worked to adapt the PCS to Australia and New Zealand.

We are also indebted to our subject matter experts - more than 50 practitioners drawn from the real world of grantmaking and community, environmental and economic development - who helped review the taxonomy and suggest changes that would make it relevant, useful and applicable to Australia and New Zealand. Input from grantmakers and other users of the system is ongoing, and vital to the continuing evolution of the taxonomy.

How we got here

In 2014 Our Community selected the Philanthropy Classification System (PCS), an initiative of the Foundation Center (now Candid) in the United States, as the base for our own taxonomy. Re-released by the Foundation Center in July 2015, the PCS represented the most relevant, most up-to-date and internationally focused taxonomy available. We were granted permission to use the taxonomy as the base of an Australian classification system under a modified Creative Commons licence.

When the revised version of the PCS was released, we swung into action, identifying more than 50 Australian subject matter experts and allocating relevant sections to them for review. We assessed their feedback and adapted the PCS accordingly. Some areas of the PCS were tweaked, others completely redrawn as CLASSIE took shape. We used a minimum-possible-change approach to ensure that we remained as true as possible to the PCS, an approach designed to ensure that our schema was practical and relevant for Australian organisations while also leaving open the possibility of streamlined international data sharing.

In April 2016, we released CLASSIE 1.0 for Australian social sector organisations, and started integrating its listings into various Our Community websites and platforms. More feedback followed, resulting in Version 1.1, which was released in August 2016. A big milestone was reached in November 2016, with the release of CLASSIE 2.0 and the move to incorporate parts of CLASSIE into SmartyGrants, Our Community's grants management platform. This move made the Subject and Beneficiaries sections of CLASSIE available to hundreds of grantmakers and, through them, many thousands of not-for-profit organisations.

In August 2017, we released CLASSIE 2.1, which was adopted by GiveNow, Our Community's online donations platform. This release saw some significant changes to the Organisation sections as well as a name and concept change to the Beneficiaries section, which is now a more versatile Population section.

In June 2018, we released CLASSIE 2.1.1, a minor update to the structure of the CLASSIE sections and sheets.

In December 2018, we released CLASSIE 3.0, a major update with two new classification sheets (Activities and Transaction types), and some significant changes to the Subject and Population sections.

In August 2018, we commenced work on a New Zealand version of CLASSIE. A draft was released for review in June 2019, and the first edition of the NZ Subject and Population sheets were released with a major CLASSIE update - CLASSIE 4.0 - which was released in October 2019. CLASSIE 4.0 was adopted for use by the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC) in 2020.

CLASSIE 4.1 was released in March 2021, followed by CLASSIE 4.2 in November 2022.

CLASSIE is very much a work in progress. We continue to plan regular updates and welcome feedback on new and revised items.

Why use CLASSIE?

There are many reasons why any funder, not-for-profit sector peak or social change organisation should consider using CLASSIE:

• Latest practice: CLASSIE represents the very latest in thinking on how to describe and classify social sector organisations and initiatives. It is being updated constantly in response to feedback from users.
• The power of the crowd: Why develop your own set of classifications when all the hard work has been done for you by others? As we always say, "none of us is as smart as all of us".
• Comparing apples with apples: You can't make proper comparisons if everyone is using different terms to describe the same things. CLASSIE brings order to the chaos.

For grantmakers using the SmartyGrants software, we provide some additional powerful incentives to start using CLASSIE:

• Dashboards: The SmartyGrants Dashboard gives SmartyGrants users instant access to data-driven, CLASSIE-derived insights.
• Overlays: We are also working towards developing tools to allow grantmakers to overlay their data with information from other sources - e.g. demographic data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
• Benchmarking tools: Once we can classify you, as a grantmaker, we can help you to compare yourself to similar grantmakers on the SmartyGrants system.
• Cross-sector data sharing: CLASSIE allows us to more easily compare one grantmaking sector with another, and provide a better picture of what all sectors combined are doing.
• International data sharing: CLASSIE is based on the very latest international system of social sector classification, facilitating data sharing across international borders.

Other reasons to use CLASSIE:

• Respectful use of data: Whichever grantmaking sector you work in, the move towards greater transparency is happening. CLASSIE is overseen by Our Community and we care as much about your right to learn in private as we care about the public's right to know about where and how grants money is being distributed - we strongly believe that these things must be carefully balanced.
• Privacy and consent: As a long-established, highly rated social enterprise, Our Community takes its reputation and its obligation to all stakeholders very seriously indeed. We don't play loose with your data. You can read our plain-English privacy policy here.

What does CLASSIE describe?

The sections of CLASSIE that are currently available describe: