Publish: Making your data available for use
Once you are happy with your data file and the Data Quality tool shows that the data is valid, the next step is to find a place on your website for hosting the file and outlining the open license you are releasing it under.
All organisations publishing data to the 360Giving Standard host their files on their own website, which means they have control over and are responsible for their data.
Choose an open license
Data published to the 360Giving Standard is open data, which means the information is available for anyone to use, reuse and share. Providing the data under an open license is a straightforward way to let users know that they have permission to use the data, as well as any conditions of use. There is no charge for using an open license, and it can be simply stated which license the data is being made available under, and linking to the full details.
Our default recommendation is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which does not restrict use but does require that users attribute the data to the original publisher. We have prepared standard wording for the licensing of 360Giving data which you can adapt for your own website. You can see this in our Guide to 360Giving Open Data Licensing.
Prepare a hosting place for your data on your website
The final step is to prepare a place on your website where your file will be available for download. You can host the data file anywhere on your site and place a link to it where it can be easily found. This could be at a dedicated “open” section/page on your site. You can also link to your data file from an existing page which shares information about your grants awarded or alongside your annual report.
Here are some examples of what other community foundations have done:
Some organisations link to their data from an existing page on their site:
Some organisations link to their data from a dedicated open data page:
Can 360Giving host the data on our behalf?
It is best practice for organisations to host their own data, so the ownership of the information is clear and you have full control over the file and can make changes and updates to the data. However if you are not able to create a place on your website to host your file or information about your open license, please contact 360Giving about options for temporarily hosting files and licensing text on your behalf: support@threesixtygiving.org.
Publish your data file
Once you have added your file to your website with the open license please inform 360Giving so a link to your data will be added to the 360Giving Data Registry. This data is now available for anyone to view, download and use.
When will our grants appear in GrantNav?
GrantNav is a platform that uses 360Giving data and it is updated on a daily basis. In order for data to be included in updates of GrantNav, the dataset needs to meet these three criteria:
- Listed on the 360Giving Data Registry;
- Openly licensed;
- Valid according to the schema used for the 360Giving Data Standard.
How often should we update our data?
This decision is up to you and should be informed by your grantmaking processes and capacity. Some organisations choose to publish annually, some publish every six months or quarterly, with others doing an update following each grant award round. The aim is to have timely information available, but what ‘timely’ means will be different for different organisations, depending on circumstances and how often grants are awarded.
Things to consider: Once you have completed the entire publication process for the first time, you will have an understanding of the amount of time and resources needed, and how it could fit alongside your other grantmaking and publicity cycles. If you already have a regular process for sharing information about your recently awarded grants, aim to align or integrate the 360Giving publication process over time.
Once published can we remove our data?
A fundamental aspect of publishing using the 360Giving Data Standard, and publishing open data in general, is that once the information is released it may be downloaded and used by anyone. An organisation is free to decide to stop publishing data and/or can remove the data from their website, however the information that has been published will still be held and used by anyone who has already downloaded it.
360Giving has a Take Down policy for the data linked from our Data Registry and loaded into GrantNav and 360Insights, so we will remove any published data on request. You can read the full policy here.