Step 1. Decide what information to publish

What information you’ll include and what time period your data will cover.

How to choose what to publish

The full 360Giving Data Standard has over 100 fields available, including information about grants and who gets them, different programmes, places, and more.

When deciding what information to include, think about your funding priorities and what you want people to know about your grantmaking.

For example, if you have a geographical focus then it will be important to include location information so that people can see where your grants are going. Or if your grants focus on working on certain causes or topics, make sure that these are included in titles or descriptions.

Including more than the required fields gives useful context, which helps you tell a clearer story, so people understand your grantmaking better. For example, the difference between the size of two grants might be explained by the fact that one is for one year and the other is for three years, but if you haven’t used the grant duration field, people won’t know that. 

Try not to treat these steps as a purely technical process. Instead, think about the story you want to tell about your grantmaking using your 360Giving data.

Essential information to include

All 360Giving data must include these 10 core ‘fields’ or pieces of information, so that your data can be included in tools like GrantNav and GrantVis. 

10 core fields

In the 360Giving Data Standard there are ten pieces of information that must be published for each grant. These 10 ‘core fields’ cover the basic who, what, when and how much of each grant. They are:

Who

• Funding Org:Name
• Funding Org:Identifier
• Recipient Org:Identifier or Recipient Ind:Identifier for grants to individuals
• Recipient Org:Name or Recipient Ind:Name for grants to individuals

What

• Title
• Description

How much

• Amount Awarded
• Currency

When

• Award Date

And

• An Identifier, a unique code for each grant to help distinguish one from another.

Recommended information to include

Apart from the 10 core fields, all other fields are optional. However, 99% of funders share some further information, which helps to make the data more useful.

Recommended fields for grants to organisations

For grants given to organisations, it’s common to share these details:

• charity and company numbers
• recipient location
• beneficiary location
• grant duration and/or planned start and end dates
• grant programme details
• metadata, which means information about your data.

If you don’t collect this data, or the information isn’t relevant to your grantmaking, these fields can be left out. For example, not all funders have programmes, and location information may not apply to grants for policy work.

You can also start by publishing simpler information and add more fields over time.

Recommended fields for grants to individuals

These recommended fields help anonymised data about grants to individuals to be more useful:

• To Individuals Details:Primary Grant Reason – this is the main reason that the grant was awarded.
• To Individuals Details:Secondary Grant Reason – this is for other reasons why the grant was awarded. 
• To Individuals Details:Grant Purpose – this is for what the funding will be spent on.

Working with funders of grants to individuals we have created two codelists that go along with these fields. You can choose the codes from the lists that most closely match the reason and purpose of each grant.

Codelists are shared lists of information items or ‘values’ which appear in specific fields. Using a standard list of values makes it easier to compare data because things are always described and spelled the same way. It’s like using a drop-down menu with different options when you are filling out a form online.

See our grants to individuals codelist field guidance.

Additional fields

If you have information that doesn’t fit any of the 360Giving Data Standard fields offered, you can include it in additional fields. Your 360Giving data file can include any number of these non-Standard additional fields. 

You can find out more about the additional fields in the 360Giving Data Standard reference documentation.

Decide how far back your data will go

Most 360Giving publishers include information about all their grants from at least the previous year, with many choosing to include between three and five years of historical data.

You can publish data going back several years, or you can focus on sharing information about recent grants. It usually depends on how much time you can dedicate to the task.

Otherwise, these questions might help you to decide.

How accurate and complete is the data that you have at the moment?

If there are gaps or errors in your older data, start from a point where you are confident in the quality of the information.

Is your past grantmaking similar to your current funding priorities?

If the grants you awarded in the past don’t reflect what you fund now, you may want to start from the beginning of your current strategy.

Remember that you can always start simple and build up – if you begin by publishing recent grants, you can include more historical data in the future if you choose to.

Including metadata

Metadata is data about your data. For example, the size of the 360Giving data file you will publish at the end of the process, how many grants it contains, and when it was published. 

Metadata is important to help both people and computer programs understand more about your data and how it might be useful for them. You can also use it to give extra context or include a disclaimer about your organisation or your grants data.

Information about your data published with your data, in the same file, is known as ‘authoritative metadata’. (There is another type called ‘derived metadata’ which is what can be found out from reading your file.)

If you would like to include metadata with the grants data you publish, you can use metadata fields in the 360Giving Data Standard. 

Including location data

Location data helps people to see where funded organisations are based and where their activities are happening, which helps to build a picture of where funding is going across the UK.

But this is only possible when good quality and consistent location data – also known as geodata – is shared.

Location information is so useful that we recommend including it whenever possible. 

Recording different types of location

The 360Giving Data Standard includes four types of location fields.

1. Recipient location is where the recipient of a grant is based.
2. Beneficiary location is where the funded work is being delivered or where the people who access it are based.
3. Location scope is the geographical scope of the funded work, for example local, regional, or national.
4. Funder location is where the funder of a grant is based.

Recipient and beneficiary locations can be shared as place names and geographic codes. Recipient and funder locations can also be shared in the form of an address, where this doesn’t include personal or sensitive data such as somebody’s home address, or the address of a refuge. 

If needed, address information can be changed into a ‘geocode’ before you publish the data. A geocode is a code referring to a geographical area like a ward, local authority or county. Postcodes themselves are a type of geocode.

For location scope, you can choose a code from a list we have created to represent the scope of the work. For example, you can use the code GLS030 to show that a grant is intended to have a national impact.

Including data about regranting

If you give grants to organisations that will then be given out as smaller grants – which is sometimes called regranting or redistributing funds – you should make this clear in your data. 

Marking grants as being meant for regranting will make it easier to see the flow of funding, and help people get a more accurate picture. For example, it will help avoid the same funds being counted twice.

We have created a For Regrant Type field and Regrant Type codelist to help funders who want to publish data about these kinds of grants. The codes describe different ways that funders can redistribute funding or contribute to funds for redistribution.

Which organisation should use the Regrant Type codelist?

The ‘donor funder’ giving the grant intended for redistribution should record their grants using this codelist. This means the funder that is named and identified by the 360Giving data fields Funding Org:Name and Funding Org:Identifier. 

Organisations that receive grants intended for regranting should not use this codelist. 

Grants awarded to recipients to fund projects and activities must not be categorised using this codelist: the field should be left blank or not supplied.