Getting started with our new Complete Guide to Publishing
Covering planning, preparing and publishing, here’s an introduction to our guide on publishing your grants data using the 360Giving Data Standard.
What is the Complete Guide to Publishing and what does it include?
The 360Giving team recently launched a Complete Guide to Publishing to help funders through the process of sharing grants data using the 360Giving Data Standard.
There are three stages in this process:
- Planning – Working out what grants data you want to share and checking for any data protection considerations.
- Preparing – Making sure that the data is in the right format so it is compatible with the 360Giving Data Standard.
- Publishing – Sharing your grants data online as open data so it’s available for everyone to use.
Who is the Complete Guide intended for?
This guidance is intended to support funders publishing for the first time. It aims to help them work through the process and answer their questions. It’s also useful for funders already publishing their grants using the 360Giving Data Standard who need a reminder of the process, or want to make changes to the data they share.
How long does it take to publish?
The time it takes to publish in the 360Giving Data Standard can vary. Factors affecting the amount of time include:
- The amount of data you want to publish
- The type of system used to collect the data
- The number of amendments needed to ensure the data is fit for publication
- Your own organisational priorities
Funders, you are in control of your own publishing process, so you can take as much time as you need and are able to give.
What should you publish?
The 360Giving Data Standard has a range of fields to describe your grants, but there are ten core fields which all 360Giving data must include.
We recommend including other useful information whenever possible, as this will make the data more usable. You can choose what other information to include depending on the data you have available and what is most relevant to your grantmaking.
If you’re looking to publish your grants data, it can be helpful to take a look at grants other funders have published on GrantNav to get a better idea of how your grants would appear. Check out the Guide to find out how to use GrantNav to search for grants similar to your own.
How do you prepare your data?
Once you’ve decided what data to publish, the next step is to prepare it. You will need to choose a file type and a method for formatting your data. How you prepare your data will be influenced by how you collect and store information about your grants, and whether you have a grants management system or database.
Some databases make it possible to export 360Giving formatted data directly from your system. If not, you will probably have a more manual process.
How do you know if your data is ready to be published?
Once your data is prepped, it needs to be checked. You can do this by using our Data Quality Tool, which tells you if the data is in 360Giving Data Standard format, as well as giving helpful feedback on any data quality issues. When the tool shows all green ticks your data is ready from a technical perspective. Once you are also happy that the content is ready, you can move on to publishing the data.
How do you publish your data openly?
Now that your data has been checked you’ll have reached the final stage (almost) – publishing! This means you upload the file to your website alongside an open licence, which lets users know the data is open and that they have permission to use it. Once your data is published you’ll let us know and we’ll add a link to your file in the Data Registry, which makes the data available in all our tools and means that anyone can access it.
What’s next?
We hope you find this guide comprehensive and helpful as you work through the publishing process, but if you need any further support from us you can always contact our Helpdesk at support@threesixtygiving.org, and we welcome any suggestions for improvements through our feedback form.
We encourage you to download, explore and use 360Giving data through our tools – and please share with us how you’ve used the data in your work by tagging us on Twitter or LinkedIn.