Why we began publishing grants to individuals data – Masonic Charitable Foundation
In this guest blog, Jo Haffenden and Ames Petzoldt from the Masonic Charitable Foundation discuss the key principles and drivers that led them to publish data on grants to individuals and families alongside grants to organisations data.
At the Masonic Charitable Foundation (MCF), the Freemason’s Charity, we have been publishing Charity Grants as 360Giving data for a number of years – and we have now started publishing our grants to individuals and their families. The Impact and Evaluation team is continually thinking about how we can progress the transparency, diversity and sector accountability of our grant-giving programmes, so the publication of grants to individuals and their families is an expansion into the more complex area of our grant-making. The impact and evaluation function acts as a catalyst to accelerate this journey. One example is opting into the Foundation Practice Rating 2024 cohort and another is the 360Giving open grants data publishing initiative, which effectively brings these principles and strands of work together.
In this blog, Jo Haffenden (Impact and Evaluation Manager) and Ames Petzoldt (Monitoring and Evaluation Officer), discuss some of the rationale, leading principles, and drivers MCF’s Impact and Evaluation team adopted to shape the delivery of this work. They also consider the challenges faced during its implementation, and share some tips for others who are working to responsibly share data on their grants to individuals and families.
We hope that by adopting an open and transparent approach to this work, we can actively contribute to the sector’s positive public benefit and encourage others to also join us in this endeavour. As funders we all have a responsibility and duty to actively make positive change happen, and this work is another area where we can help make a difference.
Contributing to the big picture of the funding sector in the UK
Our Masonic Support programme provides support to individuals and their families who have some form of familial ties to Freemasons. Making the support the MCF provides to these individuals and their families visible and trackable was identified as an imperative initiative, needed to equip the sector with a more comprehensive dataset of the charitable support distributed by funders across UK nations. In the process of building the reporting system to share this open data, the Impact and Evaluation team was particularly interested in ensuring the data could contribute to mapping the grants against the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) and Welsh Indices of Multiple Deprivation (WIMD); the official measures of relative deprivation for small areas in England and Wales. These range from 1-10, where 10 indicates the least deprived areas. We know that wealth tends to concentrate in certain regions, perpetuating inequality. Adopting an active role in securely sharing data about grants to individuals and families alongside information about the relative deprivation was a way to recognise ourselves as active agents to enable social change at the geographical / place-based level. However, we soon encountered important ethical considerations.
Making it ethical
The eligibility of our grants to individuals programme focuses on the Freemasonry male population in England, Wales, the Channel Islands, and the Isle of Man which is about 150,000 people, and constitutes less than 0.25 percent of the total population of these nations. The publication of this data at the geographical IMD level posed a potential threat to beneficiaries’ confidentiality when compared to other similar charitable grant-making bodies.
The 360Giving Data Standard typically recommends funders include beneficiary location data at electoral ward. However, the team decided that sharing geographical information at the ward level was too small an area given the population we serve, and would potentially make beneficiaries identifiable. The next option was Local Authorities (LA) – which have an average size of 161,800 residents. This meant we were comfortable with disclosing LA information, provided we redacted information related to the two smallest LAs, the Isles of Scilly with only 2,000 residents and the City of London with only 9,000 residents.
Finally, this left us with the question of including IMD information, which are assigned to Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) usually comprising between 400- 1200 households or 1,000 – 3,000 people. If we were to publish this information alongside the LA, some LSOAs would be identifiable as the only LSOA in the local authority which holds that decile. We therefore decided to group IMDs in the following ways: 1-3, 4-6, 7-10. This leaves us with 25 identifiable LSOAs, for which location data is also redacted. We concluded that this provided the compromise we sought, balancing the need for stringent anonymity whilst also being as transparent as possible in showing how our grants were reaching areas of greater or less need.
Make it sustainable and make it work for you
All in all, we recommend using the 360Giving guidance and templates provided but adapting this to fit with your specific circumstances. For example, as well as the information detailed above, we also include masonic provinces in our data which will be used by us and our key stakeholders.
The project of sharing this data requires careful consideration. Take the time to strategically balance out the main purpose and reasons for publishing your data openly. We recommend you allocate plenty of time to the project, especially when developing and implementing a new process you will come to rely on later. For us, to develop the tools we needed, this involved engaging with several different internal and external stakeholders. We found valuable support from 360Giving throughout this journey; whenever we reached out to them with queries, they were always available to provide signposting, assistance and guidance.
As another part of making this process sustainable, we were able to integrate precise location data into our main database in a way that produces anonymous reports for 360Giving, however, this is not visible to internal users in any other way. This allows us to uphold our data standards and principles whilst also automating the report.
Our journey toward embedding transparency, accountability, and diversity within impact and evaluation has been marked by thoughtful deliberation, ethical considerations, and collaborative efforts. By participating in initiatives like the 360Giving open data publishing initiative, we demonstrate our commitment to contribute to positive change. Through careful navigation of challenges such as ensuring confidentiality for beneficiaries while maximising data utility, we have laid a path that not only benefits our organisation but also contributes to the broader philanthropic landscape in the UK.
As we share our experiences and insights, we invite others to join this ongoing endeavour, recognising that collective responsibility and action are essential for effecting meaningful and lasting change. Moving forward, we remain dedicated to refining and sustaining our publishing practices, ensuring that they continue to serve both our mission and the greater good.