Refining your search
Search modes – Restricting the search to certain fields
Once you are on the search results page, five search modes appear below the search bar. Click on these to restrict your search to that field, or group of fields.
All grant fields mode
This is the default and widest search mode and it searches a range of key fields in the grant records. It helps when you‘re looking for as much information as you can find, to filter later. This might mean that you get some irrelevant results, but you‘re less likely to miss anything.
For example, if you search for Reading, then you‘ll see grants that have a location in Reading, Berkshire, as well as grants for reading literacy. Generally, it‘s best to start with an ‘All grant fields’ search, and then to select a different search mode if you find that there are too many irrelevant results.
Locations mode
This mode searches within just the location fields in grants. It excludes any grants that don’t have a location published or any grants with a wider location scope than your search (eg, a grant for Scotland won‘t appear in a search for Glasgow, but a grant for Glasgow will appear in a search for Scotland).
Recipients mode
This mode searches just within the names of the recipient organisations. This can be particularly helpful if you’re looking for an organisation that you already know the name of, or if you’re looking for organisations where the type of organisation is usually in the name – for example, guides for local Girlguiding groups, where searching all fields would also identify funding for development of user guides, tour guides, and unrelated activities.
Grant Programme Titles
This mode searches just within the names of programmes. This can be particularly helpful if you’re looking for a programme that you already know the name of, or if you’re looking for programmes that are likely to be descriptively named.
Note: Not all organisations publish grant programme titles, so their grants will not be included in the results.
Titles and descriptions
This mode searches just within the titles and descriptions of grants. This can help to avoid inadvertently matching within other fields that aren‘t relevant.
Refining your search using filters
On any search results page, you will see a list of filters on the left-hand side. These allow you to filter by different fields.
- Funder filters: Organization type, Organization name, Grant Programme Title
- Location filters: Country and Region, County, District
- Grant filters: Amount, Currency, Award date, Grant Type
- Recipient filters: Recipient Type, Recipient Organization Name
Under each section, you will see the available filters.
For each filter, clicking on a value will filter the search results to contain only the grants that match that criterion, unless “Exclude selected” is chosen in the filter, in which case it will return results that do not match the selected criterion.
To select multiple criteria, click on each relevant value. Each time you click on a filter, it will apply that filter to the results immediately. Click a second time to deselect a filter.
The filters for the lower levels will reflect anything selected at the higher levels. Eg, if you select West Midlands in the Region filter, the counties and districts available to filter on will only be those in the West Midlands.
For some filters, such as District, Programme Title, and Recipient, there are too many options to display at once, so a search is included. Clicking on the search will display the options with the largest number of matching grants, or you can begin typing to bring up relevant options and you can click on a specific option to select it.
The numbers in brackets next to the values show the number of grants in the search results that match that criterion.
Location filters
Understanding where a grant is located is one of the most common tasks that GrantNav is used for. However, there is a potential for misinterpretation – the absence of data shouldn’t be assumed to be the absence of grants. There is also a lot of nuance in the scope of delivery, which can lead to misunderstanding. More information is available to help you to use the location information.
Location is one of the most used search criteria, but not all funders share location data as it is an optional field. This is because location data isn’t kept by all funders, and it’s not always relevant to a grant.
The 360Giving Data Standard allows funders to include both Recipient Organization Location (the place where the Recipient Organization is based) and Grant Location data (the place where the funded activity is taking place).
Because Grant Locations usually provide more accurate ways to answer the question ‘Where do grants go?’ than Recipient Locations, the Location mode of the search bar and filters use the ‘Best Available‘ location by default, which returns grants where either Grant Location or Recipient Location data shared by funders match the criteria set, with priority given to Grant Location when both are available. In addition, it is possible to switch the Location filters to return results based on Recipient Locations only or Grant Locations only, where available. Please note, however, that this will likely reduce the number of grants available in the filter.
If you use the filters to filter by location, please note that these filters are very specific – they show only grant records that include Recipient or Grant Location geodata, such as a UK postal code, or Local Authority or Region geocode. If you are using a location filter, any grants missing this data will be excluded, so you may miss relevant grants just because the location data was not published, or because it has been recorded at larger geographical level such as a region, so won’t appear when you search in a more local district.