Throughout July, journalists utilized tools and data from the Sunlight Foundation to inform their reporting, some examples of which we’ll cover below. Assisting and empowering reporters is a central component of Sunlight’s mission; if you’re working on story, see if our tools can help and feel free to get in touch.

The Star Tribune analyzed data provided by the Sunlight Foundation to examine how Minnesotans were giving to presidential candidates and created a nice visualization, seen to the right:

The state’s residents donated more than twice the cash to her than to all the other presidential hopefuls combined — including other Democrats, from April through June.

All told, Minnesotans gave more than $780,000 to all presidential candidates in the second quarter, according to a Star Tribune analysis of data provided by the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan advocate for open government.

Of that amount, the Democratic former secretary of state and first lady scooped up 71 percent, or a whopping $559,700.

When The Washington Post recently examined the lobbying push by groups opposed to the Iran deal, they cited reporting from the Sunlight Foundation that used documents processed in our Political Ad Sleuth project.

Political Party Time, Sunlight’s database of political fundraisers, is regularly a resource utilized by reporters — and July was no exception. USA Today, ABC News, The Tennessean, Business Insider and many others used the project when reporting on the spike of fundraisers that occurred when Taylor Swift came to D.C. on her 1989 tour. Party Time collected 26 fundraising events during the two nights she performed at Nationals Stadium.

The Jakarta Globe used the Money, Politics and Transparency project to report on Indonesia’s transparency ranking among other countries. The MPT study assessed countries based on global norms to build more transparent political financing systems. This collaboration between the Sunlight Foundation, Global Integrity and the Electoral Integrity Project was also cited in a news round-up in Foreign Policy.

Thank you to all the journalists and citizens that used our resources in July and we look forward to another productive month!