Open data is essentially open access to public sector information to facilitate knowledge sharing, find patterns across organizations (e.g. Hans Rosling in his famous TED-talks) and empower the community to help you make sense of this data in new and interesting ways a la mashups.
We see the carrot for NGOs in appealing to their marketing/communications strategy. We can start by swapping out basic maps on NGO websites that are living in data silos, for open ones that have plugs back into the larger ecosystem. See NGO open map example and a larger aggregated map of this NGO and others that this foundation supports.
Once it's in a standard we can build an open data layer (API) over it. We have also exposed this data in a more event driven way using a data standard built on RSS called ProjectRSS.