360Giving Founder and Chair Fran Perrin awarded OBE
We are delighted that our Founder and Chair Fran Perrin has been awarded an OBE in today’s honours in recognition of her charitable services, including for setting up and driving 360Giving, particularly during COVID-19.
In its five years, 360Giving has changed the status quo for funding in the UK. With support from 360Giving, the UK’s leading funders are now publishing data about their grants in the 360Giving Data Standard. Thanks to their collaborative efforts, over £33bn of grants data has now been made open, meaning it can be accessed, compared and analysed with free tools such as GrantNav and 360Insights.
This has proved an essential resource for trusts and foundations looking to make better funding decisions over the past five years, but especially during crises such as COVID-19. Thanks to the timely, collaborative efforts of funders publishing their data, over £217 million of COVID-19 grants are now available for search and analysis with our COVID-19 Grants Tracker.
“I feel very lucky to have been able to support
many charities doing hugely important work”
Ultimately, this helps towards our overarching goal of ensuring that charities can get the support they need.
Proving the power of collaboration
Fran is one of 1,495 people who received an award – another of which we are delighted to know is Will Perrin, another of 360Giving’s trustees, for his services to Technology and Internet Safety Policy.
Commenting on her honours, Fran says:
“I am honoured to have received this OBE. It is wonderful to have our work to open up grants data recognised in this way.
“We couldn’t have got as far as we have without our funders and supporters, our tech team, the Standard’s Stewardship Committee, and the funding organisations that publish their grants data openly.”
360Giving has demonstrated the power of collaboration and innovation for the sector, with funders working together in unprecedented ways to make the best use of their resources.
“The COVID-19 crisis has made this especially clear,” Fran continues. “In such difficult times, it was so important to have had the infrastructure there to quickly track and analyse grants. We have seen funders across the UK work extremely hard to open their grants data quickly, so it can be combined with each other’s and analysed. It has shown what we are capable of when we have the tools, and that together we can make up more than the sum of our parts.”
As well as her work on 360Giving, Fran’s OBE is also for her substantial gifts, made through the Indigo Trust, to help charities respond to the coronavirus emergency. The grantees included the National Emergencies Trust and Trussell Trust as well as The Oxfordshire Community Foundation, which is also a 360Giving publisher and has made £1 million in grants this year, mainly to help local communities in their response to COVID-19.
Accepting on behalf of the sector
Fran maintains a strong focus on recognising and meeting the needs of the communities and charities who need our support.
“I feel very lucky to have been able to support many charities doing hugely important work. I feel that I am accepting this honour on their behalf.”
Setting up 360Giving: Fran’s motivation
“I really wanted to learn from other people,
and see what other donors were doing”
Fran founded 360Giving in 2015 because, as a philanthropist, she couldn’t find the information she needed to inform her funding decisions.
“When I was 18, I was privileged enough to inherit wealth, and I set up my own philanthropic foundation,” Fran shared in a 360Giving video. “But when you’re 18 you don’t know much about what you’re doing in life, let alone how to be a strategic philanthropist. So I really wanted to learn from other people, see what other donors were doing, and how they make decisions on who and what to fund. But I found it really hard to find out any information.
“I was really inspired by some of the open data movements that showed if you publish information in an open, comparable format, you can search across it, you can compare what one person is doing to another. I wanted to see if that could work in philanthropy; if grantmakers could open up their information so that anyone could benefit from it.”
Fran then worked with others in the sector to test out the idea and worked with data scientists to develop the 360Giving Data Standard.
How far we’ve come
Since then we’ve worked hard to help more and more funders publish open data about their grants – using the 360Giving Data Standard – and empower people to use this data to improve charitable giving.
In July this year we celebrated our 5th birthday, and took the opportunity to share some of our highlights, challenges and lessons.
If you’d like to be kept up to data of our work and programmes, including our upcoming Data Champions programme, you can sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Twitter @360Giving.