Winner 2015 : Journalism for good

IndiaSpend is the country’s first data journalism initiative. It uses open data to analyse a range of issues with the broader objective of fostering better governance, transparency and accountability in the Indian government. Founded in 2011, IndiaSpend, a non-profit, focuses on critical data that can help the country at large take objective views on important policy issues and foster data-led discussion and analysis. A twin objective is also to make the use of data exciting and a first recourse for young India, rather than opinion, by utilising various social media sources to reach this population.

IndiaSpend has been a former winner in this category. Since then they have only managed to excel in their social media engagement. Its Facebook page likes have improved by 38% from 3590 likes in June 2014 to 4964 in July 2015 with total impressions at 590,502 and link clicks at 2991 in the same time period. On Twitter, the number of followers has tripled from 3349 to 9034 in 11 months. The Indiaspend Hindi launched in April 2015 saw its followers increase from 15 to 170 from April to June 2015. In the same time period, the impressions were 39,000 and 26 mentions and 455 profile visits.