Non-profits collaborate on Canadian data standard for community organizations

Author Sharlene Gandhi

The Ontario Nonprofit Network, Canadian Mental Health Association and Canadian Centre for Nonprofit Digital Resilience are among the organizations that have contributed to the development of a new data governance standard for community services. 

Published in May 2025 by the Digital Governance Standards Institute, the CAN/DGSI 100-11 standard was developed in conjunction with a volunteer Technical Committee that included these organizations, alongside the Ontario Trillium Foundation, Common Approach to Impact Measurement, New Brunswick Institute for Research, and others. 

Applicable both to non-profits and their funders, the Standard emphasizes the need for dedicated staff responsible for data governance, and regular audits to ensure compliance. 

The Standard also stresses the importance of informed consent when collecting information on clients in the non-profit sector, and suggests that organizations practice “data minimisation”: a practice of only collecting data that is required to accomplish a specific goal, and destroying it once that goal has been achieved. 

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  • Sharlene Gandhi is the Future of Good editorial fellow on digital transformation.

    Sharlene has been reporting on responsible business, environmental sustainability and technology in the UK and Canada since 2018. She has worked with various organizations during this time, including the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University, AIGA Eye on Design, Social Enterprise UK and Nature is a Human Right. Sharlene moved to Toronto in early 2023 to join the Future of Good team, where she has been reporting at the intersections of technology, data and social purpose work. Her reporting has spanned several subject areas, including AI policy, cybersecurity, ethical data collection, and technology partnerships between the private, public and third sectors.

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