What to look out for?

360Giving data contains a significant breadth and depth of information about grants in the UK, which can provide meaningful insights. However, the data has limitations and there are common pitfalls to look out for before drawing any conclusions.

Missing data

Data published using the 360Giving Data Standard is shared voluntarily, so not all funders openly publish their data. Those that do can also choose what data they share – so they may choose to only publish some of the grants they award, or have only started sharing data from a particular date.

GrantNav does not include anything other than the data provided by funders, plus the 360Giving enhancements described above. 

As such, depending on the sector or location you are interested in, some key stakeholders may not be included. To gain a fuller picture, you may need to complement 360Giving grants data with information from other sources such as charity regulators, funders’ own websites, or other research. You can also counter the effect of missing data by focusing on a smaller subset, where you are confident that the required data has been published.

Missing fields

All published data must include the ten required fields, so you will find these fields for all published grants. Other fields, such as programme names or location information, are optional and not all funders share this data. Some fields are not relevant to all grants. For example, the For Regrant field is used to identify cases where the grant recipient in the data is not the final recipient of the funds. 

This means it’s not always possible to determine if a grant lacking this data is a direct grant not intended for regranting, or if it is a regrant but the funder has not used this field. It’s important to keep this in mind when exploring data in GrantNav. Since not all grants have this data, filtering on these criteria could result in missing relevant grants.

Location data

Searching for grants using locations is one of the most common tasks that GrantNav is used for, because it includes a wide range of geographical data. However, it is important to be aware of the structure and limitations of this data to avoid misunderstandings.

Not all funders share location data, as it’s not always considered relevant and isn’t collected by all grantmakers. 

360Giving Data Standard allows publishers to include both Recipient Location (the place where the Recipient Organisation is based) and Grant Location data (the place where the funded activity is taking place).

When a grant does include location information, in the form of a postcode or ONS Geographic Code (geocodes), GrantNav uses this data to power its location functions, looking up and populating the name and geocodes of the Ward, District (or Local Authority), County (including Unitary Authorities) and English Region or UK Country that the provided location is in, where possible.

If you filter by location, this is very specific – you will see only grant records that include Recipient or Grant Location data. If you are using a location filter, any grants missing this data will be excluded – so relevant grants without location data won’t appear. 

Available data can vary by region depending on which funders publish, so it’s important to understand if any key funders in the location you’re looking at do not publish, and are therefore missing. 

The Data Quality Dashboard can help identify which funders have and have not published location data. From the Publishers tab, you can filter by Publisher Name, or by data features such as whether they include Recipient Location or Grant Location codes.

Find out more about refining your search with filters.

Scope of delivery

Recipient Location may not reflect the scope of delivery as the project location or communities served by the funding may be elsewhere. Without taking this into account, grants can appear to disproportionally go to cities – especially London. To highlight this, in our research for UKGrantmaking 2024 we found that only a third of the money received by organisations based in London was for delivery in London only.

GrantNav will default to the “Best Available” location, which uses the Grant Location where available, and uses the Recipient Location if the Grant Location is unavailable.

Timeliness and recency

Any data published, providing it passes our data validation checks, will be available the following day.

Time scales and frequency of publishing vary significantly by funder. Some have an automatic feed that updates whenever a grant is awarded, while others may only publish once a year. It’s important to take this into account when looking at data in case a key funder that you would want to include has not yet published their grants for the time period in question.

The Data Quality Dashboard can help identify the recency of the data and when a funder most recently published. To check the status of a funder’s publishing, click on the Publishers tab and in the ”Refine your search” section on the left-hand side you can select or type in the publisher’s name(s). The results will give you a history of the number of grants they have published and also show the features they have included in their published data, eg Grant Locations. This can help you identify if the data is suitable for your intended use.

The data contains grants going back decades. Depending on your needs, we recommend that you refine your search to more recent grants using the Award Date filter on GrantNav.

Find out more about refining your search with filters.

Organisation Identifiers (Org IDs)

One organisation can have many different variations of its name (“R S P B,” “Royal Society for the Protection of Birds,” “The RSPB,” and so on), and different organisations can have the same or similar names. Because of this, GrantNav uses the Organisation Identifiers (Org IDs) provided by funders to distinguish between different organisations and to link them together when funders refer to the same organisation.

Many organisations in the UK have some sort of official registration number that can be used as an identifier, for example, a registered charity or company number. When funders include Org IDs using official registration numbers in their 360Giving data, it makes it possible to see when a recipient has received grants from multiple funders. It also allows grants data to be linked or combined with information taken from official registers.

Some organisations have more than one official registration number: they might be a charity and a company, or a charity and an educational establishment. If different funders have identified the same organisation using different official registration numbers, GrantNav is sometimes able to match them together and group all the grants associated into a single view, where official data matching those Org IDs is available. 

Recipients are identified by the Org ID that each funder uses. 

Not all organisations in GrantNav are identified using official registration numbers. Some organisations, such as small unregistered groups, do not have any official registration number that could be used to create an Org ID. Sometimes, a funder does not include the official registration numbers for an organisation in their 360Giving data because they don’t collect this information.

Grants to individuals and families do not have an Org ID. As the grants are published anonymously, they cannot be matched to see if an individual has received multiple grants.

Duplicate recipient organisations

When there is no official registration number available for an organisation, the funder sharing the data must use an internal identifier – these begin with 360G. In these cases, GrantNav is not able to group the grants published by different funders together and each different Org ID will have a single view. This means a single organisation could have multiple pages on GrantNav because it could not be linked to other references belonging to the same organisation.

Sometimes duplicate records can be created due to typos, mistakes, or incorrectly formatted Org IDs. This can also result in different organisations being wrongly linked together. See our guidance on errors in the data below.

If you think you have found several records relating to the same organisation in GrantNav, you can select or de-select multiple recipient records to include or exclude in your results, using the Recipient Organisations filter, found towards the bottom on the left-hand side of any GrantNav search.

Regranting

The 360Giving Data Standard allows funders to identify grants intended for onward distribution using the For Regrant field. This is helpful to understand where the recipient of the grant is not the final recipient of the funds. This field is optional, so not all funders share this data. If the For Regrant field is not used, GrantNav assumes it is a direct grant.

Using the Grant Type filter on the left-hand side of any search result page in GrantNav, you can include or exclude grants identified for regranting.

If you are using the data for statistical research, including grants for regranting may result in double-counting funding, as both the initial grants and subsequent grants distributed by the regranting funder may be included if they both publish their data. It can also create a skewed picture of funding received by an organisation for their own use if they may have received funds to distribute to members or other groups. It distorts the size of grants and eventual recipients if GrantNav shows a very large grant but, in reality, this is being redistributed in small grants to grassroots organisations.

Negative or zero-value grants

Funders sometimes set the grant value to be £0 for accounting reasons, or to signify something about the grant (such as that it was regranted) or a negative value to indicate a refund or not fully spent grant. Please refer to the funder’s or publisher’s website for further information about their data, and if needed contact them for clarification.

These values are included when generating the summary statistics in GrantNav.

Errors in the data in GrantNav

360Giving data is collated from open data published by a range of grantmakers, as well as data taken from official sources, such as charity regulators and the Office for National Statistics. 

If you find an error in data about your organisation

If you see something about your organisation or the funding it has received in GrantNav that doesn’t look right, please submit a grantee amendment request. Please review the guidance before submitting the form to ensure your request is handled appropriately. You will need to provide a link to the relevant page in GrantNav and share your contact details so you can be updated on your request.

If you find an error which is not about your organisation

If you need to report a problem in the data that is not about your organisation, please contact the funder who published the information directly. You can navigate to the relevant GrantNav funder page from any grant record for more information about them.

Data use – licenses and attribution

The data included in GrantNav is made openly available for anyone to access and reuse.

All the data has been published under compatible open licenses. The data can be reused for any purposes under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA), provided that it is attributed and any derived works are released under the same license.

To reuse data from GrantNav, you must:

• Provide copyright and attribution information about the original data.
• Attribute GrantNav

You may not use the 360Giving or GrantNav logos without permission.

Attributing the original data

Details of the copyright and attribution information for the original data can be found in the list of 360Giving datasets used and also in files downloaded from GrantNav. Details for an individual funder can be found at the bottom of their organisation page in GrantNav.

Attributing GrantNav

Please include the following attribution:

“Contains data from GrantNav a 360Giving application released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA)”