Understanding the Usefulness tab feedback

When you test your file using the 360Giving Data Quality Checker, the feedback is split into several tabs including Summary, Validity, Conversion Errors and Usefulness. The Usefulness tab highlights ways to make your data more useful.

What the Usefulness checks look for

For each check, the 360Giving Data Quality Checker gives feedback on a key feature that can make the data more useful for analysis, which we recommend including in 360Giving data whenever possible.

Feedback is triggered when the following information is missing from the data.

• Organisations
  • Official organisation references, such as charity or company numbers
• Location
  • Recipient location
  • Beneficiary location
• Grants
  • Grant programmes
  • Grant duration
• Metadata
  • Last Modified information
  • Data Source

Unlike the error messages in the Summary, Validity and Conversion Errors tabs, this feedback does not mean your data is invalid. It can be ignored when not relevant or until you are in a position to update your data quality.

The feedback explained

Organisation: grants have a Recipient Org:Identifier that starts ‘360G-‘

This feedback is common because, if an organisation doesn’t have a charity or company number or another official reference, we recommend the Recipient Org:Identifier is created using an internal identifier instead, with the publisher prefix which starts 360G-.

• If you do not collect or share charity or company numbers, or any other official organisational references, you will see this error for all your grants. It is strongly advised that you begin to collect and share this data wherever possible, as this makes your grants data more useful and comparable.
• If you do collect and share charity or company numbers, or other official references, then the percentage of grants with 360G-type Recipient Org:Identifiers should broadly match the proportion of grant recipients that are small and unregistered groups, or do not have official identifiers in reality.
• If the proportion of grants with an internal identifier is higher than you would expect, you should investigate further.
• If you also receive feedback saying grants do not have either a Recipient Org:Company Number or a Recipient Org:Charity Number, check whether the proportion of grants without a charity and company number roughly matches the proportion of 360G- type org IDs. If there is a significant difference, this may also point to a wider issue with the formatting of your data.

Location

The usefulness feedback identifies missing recipient organisation location or beneficiary location information.

The feedback also highlights inconsistencies, such as recipient geocodes without beneficiary geocodes, beneficiary location names without corresponding geocodes, and beneficiary geocodes without recipient organisation geocodes.