Our project began in 2007. Working with a transnational consortium of nonprofits in the Netherlands, Hungary, Germany and the UK, we built and tested a pilot website called guidestarireland.ie. Funding for this test of concept came from the Irish government, the European Commission, and a group of Irish charities and philanthropies.

In 2009, with further support from government and from private donors and philanthropies, we began the 30-month project to design and build a full-scale database, and create our own website to publish extracts updated daily. This involved a lot of consultation with nonprofits. We also had expert inputs from analysts and financial reporting specialists, who helped to design the database so it can receive hundreds of items of regulatory and financial data from non-standard reports.

In March 2011 we began the release of their individual microsites to the 8,000 nonprofits listed, inviting them to review their pages and augment them with additional content. With the benefit of their feedback, we added further functionality to the website.

In November 2011, as planned, we launched a Beta release of the free searchable website.