Clean your data
We can prepare and clean your data, ensuring it’s high-quality, accurate and consistent, so it can be used effectively for publishing and analysis.
Cost: Tailored to your needs and budget
For: Funder groups and networks, Grantmakers, Researchers and policymakers
What is data cleaning?
To be useful and usable data needs to be accurate and consistent. We support both individual funders and groups of funders to improve the quality of their data so that it is ready to be analysed together and published openly.
This might involve compiling data held in different systems or files, applying the correct formatting, removing inconsistencies in text, and removing duplicates. Cleaning also involves matching organisation records to official identifiers such as their charity or company number, and aligning location information to official geographical data. These processes can be carried out on small batches of data, or in bulk on large datasets. Along with the cleaned data, we highlight any ambiguous results that will need further review and provide recommendations for maintaining data quality on an ongoing basis
In practice example
Support for a group of funders
A group of funders with a high volume of historic grants wanted to improve the quality of their data so that it could be analysed more accurately, including understanding the number of unique organisations in the dataset. They also wanted to improve the quality so that it could be shared publically, including using the 360Giving Data Standard, and be more useful to other people who wanted to understand their work.
We processed the grants data, matching grant recipients to charity, company, and other official information when possible. Once the data had been through the cleaning and reconcilation process, we provided the funders with a file of the original data and the recommended changes identified, for example corrected charity numbers and names, with information about how confident we were about the matches. This helped the organisations to prioritise manual review on the cases that were less clear, while accepting the bulk of changes. This provided an efficient mechanism for the funders to improve the quality of their data for their own purposes and to prepare it to be published.
Get in touch
If you’d like support with this sort of thing, please do get in touch with us using the form below. We tailor our services for each client, and would work with you to design an approach that meets your needs and budget. We offer a range of consultancy services which we can provide in any combination, so you can confidently understand and use grants data.