News
GrantNav at 10: what we have built together
30 September 2026
Ten years of GrantNav shows what can happen when funders contribute to shared infrastructure. As the tool reaches its tenth anniversary, we’re celebrating the people who have made it possible and inviting the sector to help shape how it continues to evolve.
GrantNav is more than a way to search grants data. Its value comes from the collective decision by hundreds of funders to make information about their grantmaking openly available, using a common approach that allows it to be brought together and explored.
Every funder that publishes its data adds another piece to the picture. Together, those pieces can help reveal connections between funders and organisations, show patterns in grantmaking and help people understand where funding is flowing.
That collective contribution has created a resource that no individual funder could have created alone.
Ten years of making the funding picture visible
GrantNav launched in 2016 with data from 25 funders. Today, nearly 360 funders contribute data, making more than 1.5 million grants worth over £338 billion available for anyone to search, explore and download.
But the story isn’t only one of scale. GrantNav itself has changed considerably over the past decade.
What began as a manual monthly update is now refreshed automatically every day. Search has expanded beyond recipient location to include grant location and, more recently, non-UK country filters. Integration with GrantVis has made it easier to explore grants through charts and maps, while enhanced download options have opened up new ways for people to work with the data.
Alongside the tool itself, 360Giving has developed ways to help people make use of the data, from sector research such as UKGrantmaking to the popular Who funds with who visualisations. Since 2022, 25 Introduction to GrantNav workshops have reached more than 600 people, including charities and social enterprises, funders, researchers, local authorities and voluntary sector infrastructure organisations.
The principle behind all of this has remained consistent. GrantNav was created to make the potential of open and comparable grants data tangible: to show what becomes possible when organisations agree to share information in the same way. In doing so, the information can become greater than the sum of its parts.
Dame Caroline Mason, Chief Executive of Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, reflects on GrantNav’s impact:
“GrantNav is a brilliant example of the power of open data. By helping UK funders publish their grants data in an open, standardised way, it helps funders and the wider voluntary sector understand where money is going, identify gaps, and make better-informed decisions. For Esmée, we think that being transparent about our funding also helps us to be accountable. Ten years on, GrantNav has become a vital part of the sector’s infrastructure, making grant-making more visible, accessible and useful. It also shows that beyond money, funders can contribute their data to a shared resource, strengthening learning, collaboration and collective impact.”
An infrastructure that keeps evolving
The environment around GrantNav has changed too.
The growth of AI is creating new possibilities for working with open grants data. 360Giving has seen developers and analysts experimenting with AI-assisted natural language search, and new ways of generating insights to support charities and fundraisers.
At the same time, AI scrapers and increased bot traffic are creating new pressures on the infrastructure that makes GrantNav freely available, affecting performance and increasing server and development costs. 360Giving is balancing the openness that sits at the heart of GrantNav with the need to protect access for human users.
That tension captures something important about shared infrastructure: it is never simply finished. It needs to evolve as the needs, technologies and wider environment around it change.
As Katherine Duerden, Head of 360Giving at Funders Together, puts it:
“GrantNav exists because funders have chosen to share their data openly, and because people across the sector have found ways to use it. Ten years on, we want to hear from those people about what has been useful, what could be improved, and what would make GrantNav even more useful in the years ahead.”
Looking Ahead
GrantNav’s first ten years offer a useful reminder of what can happen when we make information more open and work on shared resources together.
As the funding landscape and the ways people use data continue to evolve, there are opportunities to make GrantNav even more useful to the people who rely on it.
That might mean improving existing features, developing better ways to help people navigate the data, or responding to new ways that people are working with open grants data. The next decade doesn’t need to look radically different from the last. It is about continuing to learn, adapt and improve a resource that has become part of the funding ecosystem.
So, as GrantNav reaches its tenth anniversary, 360Giving is asking the people who use and contribute to it to share what would make it more useful in the next ten years.
Share your ideas in 360Giving’s short GrantNav survey and help shape the next ten years.
GrantNav’s story exemplifies what becomes possible when funders share, contribute and build together. Ten years on, that feels like something worth celebrating, and something worth continuing.