About our Data Standard

Introduction

The 360Giving Data Standard was created out of a collaboration between grantmakers, researchers, and open data experts. This spirit of working together remains at the heart of all we do. 

We were informed by and followed the example of international standards which support accountability in public spending – such as the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which collates data on aid funding, and Open Contracting, which focuses on government procurement. We learnt lessons from these standards that came before us and were inspired by them. 

However, we are not a transparency initiative – we work mostly with philanthropic funders, and sharing data is voluntary. That is apart from the UK government, who adopted our Standard for grants publication in 2019. This means that when the UK government publishes data about its grantmaking, it uses the 360Giving Data Standard. 

What is 360Giving data? 

A data standard is a technical specification, but it essentially means that data is recorded using the same headings and formatting. Standardised formatting allows data to be collated and analysed across different funders and recipients.

Most funders publish data in spreadsheets, and a few use a technical format known as JSON. Funders are the owners of the data and publish it on their own websites. They share their data under an open license, which means it can be “freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose”. 

There are three levels of data available: 

• Required data fields that are published by all funders for all grants. These are 10 fields that cover the who, what, how much, and when of each grant. 
• Optional data fields that are published by some funders and not available for all grants. 
• Enhanced data fields that 360Giving provides from other sources such as charity regulators and the Office for National Statistics (ONS), based on official organisation identifiers and location codes in the data published by funders.

In its raw form, 360Giving data appears as a spreadsheet with column headings at the top and a row for each grant record. The data, including any enhancements, is updated daily and made available for anyone to use in our 360Giving tools such as GrantNav, our search engine for grants data.

Our Standard was deliberately designed to have a low barrier to entry, and to be flexible. Optional fields make the data more useful and usable – so we recommend that funders include them wherever possible. This includes information about the location and duration of the grant, or if it was awarded under a grant programme. For grants to individuals, there are two categories to describe the grant reason: why the grant was made and what it was spent on; to ensure the anonymised data is as useful as possible. 

How is the data shared? 

Each grantmaker publishes their files of data online, usually on their own website. They include an open license statement that lets people know they have permission to use the data, along with a link to the file. 

This diagram shows how the data that funders publish gets into the 360Giving systems and tools:

In this example, you can see there are two funder files, each hosted on their own websites. Our systems download these files each evening, check and combine the files, then upload them to our Datastore – which is where our tools get the data from. This means that if a funder updates or amends their grants data, it will appear in our tools the following day.