Our values
We want more money to go where it’s needed most and, as you’ll see across our website, we facilitate this by promoting the publication and use of open grants data. But how we do this work is just as important to us as what we are delivering. At the heart of all we do is a commitment to five values: we are purposeful, open, curious, collaborative, and inclusive.
These guide our approach, our strategy, and what we prioritise day-to-day. Our values are not just words in a document, but completely embedded in our culture. They are core to our ways of working: we describe how we will deliver on them in every project plan, make them visible in each meeting and in our relationships. We hold each other to account on personally living our values, including reflecting on how we are each demonstrating them in our staff and trustee appraisal processes.
Purposeful
We have a bold and ambitious vision for grantmaking to become more informed, effective, and strategic, by inspiring funders to use data in their decision-making. We’re focused on driving meaningful change in philanthropy for charities, and improving outcomes for communities and good causes across the UK.
In practice
Our strategy and intended impact drive our priorities and the choices we make. They support us to take risks and be bold in pursuit of our aims, while also being clear about what we won’t do. We use our Strategy Outcomes Framework to prioritise our time on activities that deliver our outcomes – and to drop activities that are not achieving the impact that we’d like, or are less aligned.
As a small charity, we aim to provide ‘one to many’ support as much as possible through our guidance and workshops, to make the best use of our resources and support as many people as we can. Ultimately, though, we try to meet people where they are, providing 1-1 support not only for prospective and existing Publishers, but also for anyone interested in using open grants data.
Open
We champion open data for the public good. We help funders make their grants data open and provide free, open-source, tools to make it more accessible, so others can use it to target resources where they’re needed most. We are open in our approach: we share ideas, challenges, and lessons with others, and are open to feedback and committed to improvement.
In practice
We continually reflect on how we can do better, including through regular surveys to understand how we can improve our work. We share our challenges and learning with others through our annual reports, in presentations, and in research reports. The latter often include a section on what we were unable to do, or would like to do differently, either in the report itself or in an accompanying blog, for example learning from our analysis of funding for Specialist Legal Advice Providers.
We also have an independent Stewardship Committee that steers the 360Giving Data Standard. It ensures that engagement and consultation with stakeholders has informed proposed changes so they meet people’s needs, and that appropriate upgrades are carried out properly and in a timely manner. This includes representatives from grantmakers, data users, technical experts, and the 360Giving team. Papers and minutes are published openly, and everyone is invited to provide ideas or feedback for the Stewardship Committee’s consideration.
Curious
We’re inquisitive and believe in using evidence. We inspire and enable people to use 360Giving data to better understand the voluntary sector. We support funders to use data to inform their decisions, share insights, and learn from each other.
In practice
Asking questions is encouraged and valued. We monitor our work closely and explore how people are benefiting and how we might improve. We change our approaches based on where we hear from people that they are getting stuck. We don’t assume we have the answers and regularly undertake ‘user research’ with stakeholders to test our assumptions to understand how we can better support people to achieve their aims.
Collaborative
We exist at the intersection of philanthropy, charities, data, and tech. Through facilitating data sharing and insight in philanthropy, we work with funders, charities, researchers, analysts, and developers to achieve our objectives, and strive to support them to deliver theirs.
In practice
360Giving is a result of collaboration between funders, researchers, and open data experts to develop ways to share data on grantmaking. This is a principle that remains at the centre of all our work – from involving people with experience of the issues we’re addressing in research, to working with subject matter experts and groups of funders to increase our reach and impact. We work with partners to apply our expertise in publishing and using open grants data to real-world challenges, supporting them to achieve their objectives while also promoting the value of publishing grants data and developing use-cases.
UKGrantmaking is an illustration of our approach. We could have delivered this alone, but we felt it was important to bring together organisations across the sector to provide the most expansive view possible of who makes grants in the UK, and to ensure the data would be useful to and used by as many people as possible. Through collaboration, UKGrantmaking became more than the sum of its parts.
Inclusive
We work to make data, our tools, and support accessible to all. We prioritise people over tech, use clear language in explaining what we do, and strive to respond to people’s needs – whatever their level of knowledge, their digital skills, or their access to software.
In practice
We prioritise inclusion to continuously improve people’s experience of our tools across our diverse sector. From working with the DEI Data Group to create a way for funders to monitor the equity of their grantmaking, to being awarded the Neurodiversity Inclusivity Confidence Award, we persistently invite feedback and reflect on how to further embed DEI into our work and practice.
You can read more about why Diversity, Equity and Inclusion matters to us, how we embed it, and find our related policies using the related links below.