Step 3. Work out who will be involved

You’ll probably need to work with other people in your organisation to publish your data – who are they?

Decide who needs to be involved

Publishing 360Giving data almost always involves more than one person in an organisation. There are a few different roles that people will need to play in the project. 

Someone might take on more than one role. Or, if your organisation is very small, one person may wear all of these different hats! If that’s you; please remember our Helpdesk is on hand to support you. 

Roles in the publishing process

• Grantmaking decision maker. Someone with a good understanding of your grantmaking strategy and funding priorities, as well as the wider context that you are working in. This person’s role is to make sure that decisions about what information you publish are aligned with the ‘big picture’, in your organisation and beyond. Once your 360Giving data is published they could also draw out insights to inform your strategy.  
• Data collector. This is a data gathering role – responsible for getting all the information you’ve decided to publish together into one place and extracting it or copying it from your grants management system.
• Data manager. The data manager is the person who will prepare your data, ‘cleaning’ it, and getting it into the right format for the 360Giving Data Standard. They will also test your data using the Data Quality Checker to make sure that it is ready to publish. Ideally, this person should have a good understanding of your grantmaking, so that they can spot errors or inconsistencies in the data.
• Data controller. This role must make sure that your data protection policy is followed and that people’s privacy is protected. They might be the data protection lead in your organisation, or just someone who is familiar with what you need to do under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). They are responsible for due diligence in other areas too, for example ensuring that published data is accurate, and that sensitive information has been removed.
• Data publisher. The data publisher is the person responsible for making sure that the file containing your 360Giving data is hosted somewhere online, along with your open license information.

It will vary from role to role how much time each person will need to give to the project, and at what points they are most likely to be involved. You might find it helpful to map this out at the start using a tool like a Responsibility Assignment or RACI framework, or simply fill in the table in our Publishing project plan template. 

Primary contact

When you register as a publisher, we’ll ask for contact details for someone who will be the primary contact for your organisation. This is who we will be in touch with throughout the publishing process, and with any updates once you’ve finished. 

Further resources

• Find out more about the RACI framework on Wikipedia.
• Get the 360Giving Publishing project plan template

Your responsibilities as a publisher

There are some ongoing responsibilities you will have as a 360Giving publisher. We’ll go into more detail about all of them later on, but it’s good to be aware of them right at the start.

It might be helpful to think about them alongside the roles we described above. Who will do what?

• Once your file of data is published (whether that’s on your own website, or on a cloud storage platform) you will need to maintain a live link to the file, and make sure it isn’t accidentally moved or deleted. 
• You’ll need to update and republish your grants data at least once a year, more often if possible. 
• If you or someone else spot something that needs to be changed in your published data, you will need to correct it.
• Whenever you make a change to your data or update it, let us know – that way we can make sure that the most up-to-date and accurate version of your data appears in GrantNav and our other tools. 
• There must be a fast, reliable way for us to contact you about any urgent requests to remove or change information in your data raised by your grantees. A shared email inbox that is checked regularly would be ideal. If this contact changes, please tell us straight away.
• We’d also like you to let us know if the primary contact changes, for example if you change roles, or leave the organisation. 

This may sound like a lot to be thinking about before you have even started looking at your data! 

But after supporting hundreds of funders through the publishing – and republishing – process, we know that a good plan can make all the difference.