BRIDGE (Basic Registry of Identified Global Entities) aims to revolutionize social sector information sharing. The social sector is a complex and critical web of organizations that play different roles in solving society's greatest challenges. In order to fully understand each organization's activities, impact, funding, and more, we must be able to firmly differentiate one organization from another and easily piece together the dispersed information about them.
BRIDGE was established to address the challenges and gaps created by other identifiers, including those issued by government agencies. These challenges include: use of the same identifier for multiple organizations; the existence of multiple identifiers for the same organization; and a lack of (findable) identifiers for organizations.
By using BRIDGE, organizations can more easily: Discover what other data exists about entities of interest, integrate that data into their own systems,Manage their own data, minimizing the likelihood of duplicate records, be findable, especially in contexts where an official registration number is not available or does not exist, share their own data with other organizations, systematically track information about organizational units
The more widespread the use of BRIDGE numbers, the more useful they will be. To encourage this adoption, BRIDGE numbers are now available as open data files in CSV format. The files, split up by country as well as by U.S. state, are updated on a periodic basis.
