How 360Giving data shapes the stories in UKGrantmaking

If you’re a funder, you can use UKGrantmaking to provide context for your work and see how your grantmaking compares to peers and the broader grantmaking field. As a funder, your grant data can also contribute to these insights. Find out what analysis of over 80,000 grant records can tell you and how, with your help, we can make the 2025 edition of UKGrantmaking even better.

UKGrantmaking is the result of a unique collaboration between 360Giving, the Association of Charitable Foundations, the Association of Charitable Organisations, UK Community Foundations, London Funders, and most importantly, hundreds of grantmakers who contributed by publishing their grant data openly using the 360Giving Data Standard.

The analysis draws on official sources of data about charities taken from UK regulators to present a more complete picture of grantmaking in the UK. The information taken from charity regulators and grantmaker accounts allows us to assess the size and shape of grantmaking sectors and how the levels of grant funding have risen or fallen in the period

What makes UKGrantmaking unique, however, is that this overview is complemented and deepened by analysis of grants data, providing insights that were not possible before the critical mass of 360Giving data became available. Each grantmaker’s commitment to sharing information about its grants in an open and comparable way allows us to learn more about grant recipients and patterns of grantmaking so that we can see the bigger picture.

What can grants data tell us?

UKGrantmaking analysis of recipients and grantmaking drew on data about 87,000 grants awarded to organisations and groups between April 2022 and March 2023. Every 360Giving grant record includes information about the amount, the award date, the recipient, and the description of the grant. This baseline of required information about the who, what, when, and how much of each grant makes it possible to explore the size of grants and the variations across grantmaking segments.

When a grant record identifies the recipient organisation using a charity, company, or other unique reference, we can link the grant data to other data available about that recipient. This unlocks a wealth of data from official sources, which helps to put the grants into context and provides additional information about the types of organisations that receive funding. 

For recipients identified using charity numbers, we can match their charity records with 360Giving data to see which communities they serve, their themes, and their income size. This is what made it possible to say that in 2022-23 most grants awarded to charities were under £10,000 and that the majority of charity recipients were small with over 77% reporting income under £1m. We were also able to show that charity recipients most commonly supported children and young people or that the most common theme was education.

Analysing grant recipients also reveals the links between funders, showing the overlap between the different grantmaking segments that make up the funding ecosystem. This is visualised in the diagram below, where the thicker the chord, the more recipients the funders have in common.

Location data is not a required type of information in the 360Giving Data Standard, and as a consequence, most grant records do not include information about the intended area of benefit for grants. This meant that in 2024 we weren’t able to analyse the data geographically across all 87,000 grants, and instead looked at geographical scope based on charity regulator data.   

Registered address data available from charity regulators allows us to see where charity recipients are based. In addition, by using ‘area of operation’ information provided by charities, we explored the geographical scope of funded organisations and saw the pattern of grants going to local, regional, national, or international charities. 

In the UKGrantmaking section focused on London, this ‘area of operation’ data allowed us to distinguish between charities registered and operating in London, and those who were based there but operated nationally or internationally. By categorising London registered grant recipients according to whether they were operating in London only, we could compare their size, the communities served, theme and grants received with other London-based charities. This analysis showed that only 34% of the value of grants awarded to London-registered charities were provided to charities operating in London only.

Explore more insights into grants and recipients across the UK, and in London.

More data means richer insights

Alongside the required information that all 360Giving data includes, grantmakers can share other data which allows us to get richer insights into patterns of funding. We recommend that funders share this data whenever possible, but because it is not required, the information available for analysis is partial and leaves gaps in the grantmaking picture. 

For example, funders can include information about the duration of a grant, which shows whether the grant was multi-year or for a short period of time. Duration information was only available for around 35% of all grants that we analysed – but from that data, we could see which types of grantmakers were more likely to offer longer grants of over 12 months, as represented by the blue and purple segments in the chart below. 

This information about the duration of a grant shows which types of funders give longer or shorter grants. It also puts the grant awarded amount into context for the period. When you know the grants’ duration, you can produce the yearly amount of grants received, which is especially important for developing an accurate picture of changes to grantmaking over time. 

We didn’t tackle longer-term trends analysis in the first edition of UKGrantmaking, but we hope to include this in upcoming editions. However, to carry out this analysis, we will need more grants to include this vital duration information so that we can understand what has changed over a longer period. 

As highlighted above, location is another type of recommended but not required information. We weren’t able to analyse the whole of the grants dataset geographically due to gaps in the data, but we were able to take a deeper dive into grants awarded by community foundations. This was because 65% of their grants included small area geographic data that could be matched with deprivation data taken from the Indices of Multiple Deprivation. From this analysis it was possible to show that community foundations were more likely to fund in areas with higher levels of deprivation, both in terms of the number of grants made and the monetary amounts.

Although the gaps in the location data available limited the kinds of geographical analysis we could do in UKGrantmaking 2024, we’re keen to develop our approaches to this analysis and will support more grantmakers to share useful and usable data about where their grants go so we can provide wider geographical analysis in future editions.

Explore more insights into the duration of grants and community foundation grantmaking.

Help us make UKGrantmaking 2025 even better

We’re grateful to all the grantmakers who shared data and made it possible to build the foundations of UKGrantmaking. Each funder’s contribution makes the analysis more representative and improves our understanding of the UKGrantmaking picture. 

We’ve received valuable feedback from partners and users of the platform on how this analysis can be made even better. Looking ahead to the 2025 edition we have exciting plans to make the grantmaking insights more useful and usable for funders, charities, researchers and policymakers. For a start, we’ll be able to build on the analysis of 2022-23, adding insights from grants awarded between April 2023 and March 2024 to examine grantmaking trends. We’ve also seen steady growth in the publication of grants to individuals, so we hope to be able to take a deeper dive into the funding provided to individuals and families during the period.

However, none of this will be possible without the data published by grantmakers. If we are to go further on sharing insights on where grants are spent and whether grants provide short or longer-term funding, more grantmakers need to publish or update their 360Giving data and go beyond sharing the minimum required fields.

To all grantmakers, please help us make UKGrantmaking 2025 broader and more useful, by publishing information about your grants awarded between April 2023 to March 2024 by the end of February 2025. We offer a wide range of free publishing support options, so visit our support pages to find out more.

• If you are a grantmaker that already publishing 360Giving data, check out your organisation on the 360Giving Data Quality Dashboard to see if your data is up-to-date and what information you include.
• For grantmakers who haven’t published 360Giving before, get in touch and we’ll help you join the open grants data movement too!