Non-profits collaborate on Canadian data standard for community organizations
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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