We’ve improved GrantNav: here’s what’s new
GrantNav is one of 360Giving’s flagship products – our search-engine for grants data.
It is a free-to-use platform that brings together open, comparable grants data that is published by UK funders in the 360Giving Data Standard.
If you are a regular GrantNav user then your browser may not show the updated site straight away, and it could look strange. You can force your browser to show the upgraded version of the tool by pressing ‘Ctrl+F5’ or ‘Ctrl+Shift+R’. We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused.
GrantNav makes it easy to search, explore and download data about where funding goes and how much is given across billions of pounds of grants, for causes and locations across the UK. The tool was developed for 360Giving by Open Data Services.
When we launched GrantNav in 2016 it contained 180,000 grants from 26 funders. Now, five years later we’ve got nearly 200 funders sharing data about over half a million grants. All this extra data means we need to make sure that GrantNav is still working well for those who use it.
We have recently updated GrantNav, based on some User Research we carried out to better understand its users. We hope the new version will better meet users needs and align the tool more with our main website branding.
What’s changed?
- We’ve updated GrantNav to reflect 360Giving’s updated brand and styles
- There’s more data available to be explored, including the size and location of organisations drawn from sources such as the Charity Commission. These additions are possible because last year we made improvements to our back-end system, the 360Giving Datastore, which supports GrantNav and our other tools. This means GrantNav can accommodate higher volumes of grants data.
- The filters are now easier to use and show more options by default.
- We’ve added a “Funding Organisation type” filter to help navigate between different funder types. So if you’re only interested in central government funding you can filter for just those funders. This is particularly useful as the number of funders publishing grants data increases.
What else will be changing?
Now we’ve got the new GrantNav in place, we’ve got more changes in the pipeline too. You’ll start to see these on the site over the coming weeks. These will include:
- More filters, such as the option of filtering by type of recipient (so you could see only grants to registered charities)
- More integration with 360Insights – our tool to combine and visualise 360Giving and charity data to understand funders better – to make it easy to explore your results there
- Adding a simple summary to search results so you can see at a glance what they contain
What do you think?
If you have any feedback or comments about the GrantNav updates so far, we’d love to know. Drop us an email at labs@threesixtygiving.org.