Step 2. See what’s involved in publishing your data

Understand all the steps in the 360Giving data publishing process.

Overview of the publishing process

The 360Giving data publishing process follows five broad stages.

1. Plan
   • Think about what resources you will need for the project and who will need to be involved.
   • Understand some of the key decisions you will need to make.
   • Find out where your grants data is stored. This could be a single spreadsheet or a purpose-built grants management system, or CRM software like Salesforce.
   • Start thinking about privacy and data protection.
   • Decide where you will save the file containing your data online so that it is always available for people to download. For example, on your own website, or on a cloud storage platform like Google Drive or SharePoint.
   • Register as a publisher with the 360Giving Helpdesk.
   • Get to know some important ideas and concepts.

2. Prepare
   • Decide what information to publish – what grants data you will include and what time period your data will cover.
   • Decide how often you will update your 360Giving data once it’s published. You should update your grants data at least once every year. 
   • Extract the data you want to publish from your system.
   • Convert your data to the right format for the 360Giving Data Standard.
   • Remove any personal data or change it to something anonymous.
   • Check your data using our Data Quality Checker and correct any errors that come up.

3. Publish
   • Decide which open license to use. The license gives people permission to use your published data.
   • Save the file containing your data somewhere online, where people will be able to download it. 
   • Publish your 360Giving data file, including the open license information
   • Add the link to your data file to our Data Quality Dashboard.

4. After publishing
   • Make a note of your publishing processes as a reminder for next time.
   • Within 24 hours, you will be able to:
     • Review the quality of your data using our Data Quality Dashboard.
     • See your data appear alongside other funders in GrantNav and GrantVis.
     • Showcase your data on your website or intranet with our free widgets.

5. Re-publishing
   • Update your grants data to publish more data. 
   • Keep in touch! Tell us about any changes to your team.

Decisions you will need to make

There are some things you’ll need to decide as you go through the publishing process. You might not have the answers right now, but it’s a good idea to start thinking about them. 

• How far back will your grants data go?
• How often will you update the grants data that you publish?
• What information will you share about your grants?
• How will you protect people’s personal information?
• Where will you host your data file online for download?

We’ve linked to where you can find further information if you’re keen to get stuck straight in. But you can simply follow the path of the steps, and our guidance will help you answer all these questions as you go through the process.

Decide if you would like to publish older grants data 

You can publish data going as far back as you want, as long as you have the data. Or you can focus on sharing information about recent grants. 

Sharing data from the past three or up to five years can be a good place to start. It will help people get a clear picture of your grantmaking and mean there is enough data for analysing trends. But it’s really up to you. You might like to start by publishing grants data from the previous year, and then go back further once you are familiar with the process.

Plan how often you will update your published data

Many funders update their data every year. Some publish every six months or quarterly. Others update after each round of grants are awarded. 

The aim is to have information available fairly soon after grants have been awarded. But what ‘soon’ means will be different for different funders and will depend on things like how much staff time you have to dedicate to the publishing process. You should update your grants data at least once every year. 

(Updating your 360Giving data follows most of the same steps as publishing your data for the first time, but it is normally quicker!)

Choose what information you want to share

You should aim to publish information about all your grants. However, some funders limit the data they publish to certain programmes or grants over a certain amount. 

There are 10 core pieces of information or ‘fields’ which all 360Giving data must include so that the data can be used in GrantNav. These 10 ‘core fields’ cover the basic who, what, when and how much of each grant.

You can share much more information than that, though – and most publishers do. Adding some ‘recommended fields’, such as location or programme details, helps to make the data more useful and give people a better understanding of your grantmaking.

Think about data protection

Once you have decided what information you want to share, it’s important to think about privacy and data protection. Open data should not typically contain personal or sensitive data that could allow a living person to be identified. 

Does your grants data include personal or sensitive information? Will you remove it? (This is also known as ‘redacting’ data.) Will you ask people for permission to publish it? 

If you award grants to individuals, it’s likely that you will have a lot of people’s personal information in your grants data. Even if you only award grants to organisations, it is still important to consider.

The first step will be to check your existing privacy policies and grant agreements to see what they say about sharing information about your grants publicly.

Decide where you will save your data file online

When your file of 360Giving data is ready to publish, you will need to ‘host’ it somewhere online so that it is always available for people to download. This might be on your own website, or on a cloud storage platform like Google Drive or SharePoint. The name and location of the file must stay the same, otherwise we won’t be able to display your data in GrantNav and our other tools.

Find out where your grants data is stored

Before you can publish any 360Giving data, you’ll need to know how your organisation currently stores your grants data.

Usually, grants data includes information about:

• when you awarded each grant
• the value of each grant
• who each grant was given to 
• what the grant is for. 

The system you use to collect and store all this information might be a purpose-built grants management system or CRM software, or even a simple Excel or Google spreadsheet.

Whatever system you use, you will need to take a copy of your grants data so that you can turn it into 360Giving data. This is sometimes called exporting or extracting data.

The most common approach is to copy or export your grants data into a spreadsheet and then edit it so that it meets the 360Giving Data Standard. 

If you use a bespoke system or configurable CRM, such as Salesforce, you might be able to export your data straight into the 360Giving data format. You might also have the option to export the data in a file format called JSON. You’ll need some technical knowledge or support for both of these, though.

You’ll need to tell us what system you use when you register as a publisher, and no matter what type it is, we can support you.

Further resources 

• Extract and prepare your data
• JSON and JSON schema

Learn about data quality

Data quality is about making sure your data is ready to be used for whatever you want to do with it. For example, if you want to make a map of where your grants have gone, you will need to record location data for all your grants in the same way. 

Checking data quality usually includes making sure that your data is right, that there aren’t important bits missing, and that it’s up to date. It should be both useful and usable, for you and for others.

It’s a good idea to explore the quality of your grants data when you are in the planning stage. It is much better to know in advance if there are big problems. You can only publish data that you have recorded. If there are gaps or errors, it may take a long time to fix them (sometimes this is known as ‘cleaning’ your data). Or if the data quality is too low you might not be able to publish that data at all. 

We have a Data Quality Checker to help you get your grants data ready for publishing 360Giving data. It will flag up some common errors and suggest ways that you can fix them. 

Think about what support you might need

Although some confidence with using spreadsheets is an advantage, you definitely don’t need to be an expert in data analysis to successfully prepare and publish your grants data.

Our Helpdesk offers regular online workshops to help you learn more about the process. We’ve written this guidance so that you should be able to go through step-by-step and find everything that you need, but we are on hand if you need help. 

When you are planning, think about where you might need some extra support. Is there anyone in your organisation who has technical skills, or who works with data, who might be able to help you? If not, perhaps you could work with someone from outside your organisation who has the skills you need. 

Further resources

• All our upcoming workshops on publishing
• All our data consultancy services