10 years of open grants data

“This work all began from a question: why was it so hard to see where philanthropic money was spent in the UK? That question kick-started a series of conversations, of workshops and planning which led to the 360Giving Data Standard and the creation of 360Giving as an independent charity. It was a moonshot project, a labour of love, and some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my career as a philanthropist. I wanted to build something that could help make life easier for charities, and make giving more strategic and effective for grantmakers. It’s been collaborative, gently revolutionary, and unstintingly optimistic. I feel immensely lucky to have worked with all the individuals who can be so proud of what we’ve achieved.”

“Chairing the Stewardship Committee brings me great pleasure in helping to maintain the 360Giving Data Standard, but I’ve long been a fan of 360Giving’s open grants data movement. I first heard about the idea when I was an NPC consultant in 2016, and a few years later, I joined forces with my software engineer husband to create a website visualising data from the Standard — we even won a prize for this in 360Giving’s Data Visualisation Challenge. Nowadays, I work for an NHS grantmaker and we get a lot out of publishing our data on grants to hospitals, patients, and local charities.”

“I’ve been involved with 360Giving since the very beginning – first as a data user and then as part of the team. It’s been fantastic to watch over ten years as people use the data in practical ways to help their organisations.

360Giving has supported a really wide range of options to access the data in this time to make that impact possible, with the GrantNav search engine, GrantVis data visualisation tool, the specific-issue Covid-19 and Cost of Living grants tracker, and recently UKGrantmaking. Now anyone can get a quick overview of funding in a specific area from GrantNav, show it to others easily with GrantVis, and then understand the wider context from UKGrantmaking which combines it with information from other sources. I’ve spoken to everyone from Chief Executives and leading funders who have learned something new about their own grantmaking from the data, to fundraisers and data science students using it to dive into the sector for the first time, and there are still so many possibilities for how more people could use the data in the future.”

“Esmée Fairbairn Foundation is a core funder of 360Giving, but our relationship started with a grant of £56k in 2016 to develop GrantNav, the first search tool for grants data from UK funders. 360Giving has developed more sophisticated ways to visualise their data, like UKGrantmaking, but a decade later GrantNav remains a key tool for anyone looking for potential partners, funders, or facts about the charitable sector. And if you can learn to use a Boolean search (and you can), or the simple filters, it might even be better than your own grant database.”

“Whilst many organisations making grants to individuals hold excellent data regarding the ‘where, what, and how’ their funds support the communities they work with, sharing that information broadly has historically proven tricky. To build our collective understanding of the wider individual grantmaking landscape across the UK, The Grantmakers’ Alliance, a collaboration of funders who make grants to individuals and families, worked closely with 360Giving. They developed a pragmatic approach to standardising and sharing this crucial information. 360Giving deftly tackled this complex problem, devising a solution that works for everyone. This breakthrough enables us to begin to build a comprehensive collective understanding of grants to individuals throughout the UK, pinpointing both where our funding is focused and, crucially, where gaps in provision may exist.”

“Power shapes the information funders collect, share, or withhold in grantmaking. For decades, funders have held most of this control. Ten years ago, 360Giving was launched to rebalance this dynamic by creating a transparent data standard for grantmakers. In a sector lacking many ways to compare practices, 360Giving enables grant-seekers to access real-time funding data alongside our published programme aims.

Building on this, the Foundation Practice Rating assesses UK funders’ diversity, accountability, and transparency — using participation in 360Giving as a key transparency measure. We aim to further challenge the power balance by not asking funders for their data but using publicly available data to assess their approach. We use the new UKGrantmaking database, developed by 360Giving and partners, as the universe from which we draw our annual cohort, illustrating how UKGrantmaking has already become an essential resource for civil society. Thank you 360Giving!”

“Sharing our grants data publicly fosters trust with our partners by communicating and mapping the reach of our funding, showing how we allocate our resources and highlighting the activities our grants are supporting. Being able to easily embed 360Giving data on our website has meant that we now have a publicly accessible and trustworthy data source we can signpost partners to when they ask us what we fund. 360Giving has enabled us to work towards the Foundation Practice Rating’s standards of transparency and helped us align with IVAR’s (Institute for Voluntary Action Research) Open and Trusted Grant-making commitments.”

“As we launched the Julia Rausing Trust (renamed from Julia and Hans Rausing Trust) in autumn of 2024, it was a great opportunity to publish all our grants for the last 10 years (over 2,000 grants totalling £465m). 360Giving is such a fantastic resource for trusts and foundations. The online tools make it incredibly easy to publish the data and make it accessible to everyone. It enables us to highlight that we fund a wide variety of grants from multi-million pound capital projects to small community initiatives under £1,000.”

“For some time, 360Giving has been an important tool for us in assessing the grant applications we receive. Last year we started publishing our grants data as we wanted to contribute to the picture they are building of the grantmaking sector in the UK.

We are keen to improve the data we collect to help us better understand our applicants, the impact of our grants, and how this fits within the context of the wider grantmaking sector. Having accurate and standardised data freely available helps us to do this.

The more we know and the more we share, the bigger the benefits for everyone, grantmakers and grant applicants alike.”

“Open data helps everyone to work better together — helping funders to be more effective. We’ve seen first-hand the power of the 360Gativing Data Standard when we’ve helped funders to collaborate at scale, on systemic issues, and across sectors. Easy to access data on funding, alongside insights from our communities, enabled our collaborative programmes in the pandemic to target resources where they were most needed. Our research projects, from mapping advice sector funding to identifying the funding gaps for equity and justice organisations, have relied on 360Giving data to help us respond strategically, avoid duplication, and better support community priorities. Sharing data benefits everyone — it’s a powerful way to learn from each other, solve problems together, and drive greater impact.”