Making publishing smoother: Tell us about your systems!
Making publishing grants data easier for funders is key to 360Giving’s strategy. Great progress has been made in the last few years – but we want to go further. We’re asking grantmakers to help us understand more about the systems they use so that we can better design our support.
At 360Giving our work is driven by a vision of grantmaking in the UK becoming more informed, effective and strategic. We want to see more money going to where it is needed most, and we believe this can be achieved through supporting a greater understanding of the grantmaking picture. In order to paint this picture we need even more grantmakers to regularly publish their data openly using the 360Giving Data Standard, so a key priority for our current strategy is making the process of sharing data easier.
Over the past few years, we have been busy trying to make it easier for grantmakers to publish grants data. So far, we have focused on:
- Developing our Helpdesk to make our support more accessible. We now provide regular free-of-charge workshops, 1-1 support calls, and operate a phone line for general enquiries.
- Enhancing our resources and tools so that grantmakers can be more self-servicing.
Your feedback has been critical to how we’ve designed this work, and the indications are that it’s making a difference. Our most recent customer survey showed that 72% of those responsible for publishing data reported that it was easy to do so. In March 2023 we launched a new way for grantmakers to get their published data into our tools, and now 68% of those sharing data do so independently (an increase from 21% and exceeding our target for the first year). And we have more plans in the pipeline. We’re particularly working on making our publishing guidance and tools more accessible and easier to navigate, exploring different formats and approaches.
The impact of systems
It’s possible to prepare and publish grants data whatever system is used to record the data. At 360Giving we’ve supported grantmakers to publish using a range of systems, including proprietary grants management software, customer relationship management systems (CRMs) configured for grants management, their own bespoke databases, as well as those with data recorded in spreadsheets.
However, we know that where grants data is held (and the quality of this data) has a fundamental impact on how easy and time-consuming it is for funders to publish their data. Some systems can be configured to make the process simpler, quicker and easier than others. This ranges from source reports that allow for manual transformation using conversion tools we’ve developed, to fully automated exports that provide a real-time feed of grants data directly from systems, and a variety of solutions in between.
Given the important role that grants management systems can play in making publishing easier, we want to explore how we can work with grantmakers, system providers and consultants to support compatibility with 360Giving data publishing.
Tell us what works for you
We’re asking both grantmakers who publish 360Giving data, and those grantmakers who don’t (yet!), to fill out a short survey about the systems they use and the challenges and barriers to publishing their data. The survey will take 5-10 minutes of your time and your feedback will help us prioritise our work to make sharing open grants data easier.
Please complete by 6th November 2024.