We are delighted to have been recognised as one of the UK’s most transformative digital organisations having been named among 10 ‘Digital Charities of the Year’ in the 2017 Digital Leaders 100 (DL100) List. The global initiative promotes effective, long-term digital transformation across government and industries. The independent list recognises 100 people and organisations across […]

Understanding the local funding environment is a complex and often difficult task. A myriad of different organisations, from charitable trusts to housing associations provide funding to a given geographical area or theme. Because much of the data that shows where the funding is going is sitting in a closed spreadsheet or computer program – often […]

Conversations around data are gaining momentum in the charity sector. Open data in particular—freely used, modified, and shared by anyone—is generating a lot of hype, and for good reason. Seeking out and analysing open data from various sources – including government data – offers funders a number of practical benefits. It can improve our understanding […]

360Giving has won the Open Data Institute (ODI) Women in Data Award 2016. Fran Perrin, Alice Casey, Katherine Duerden, Anna de Pulford and Rachel Rank jointly won the award, presented by ODI President Sir Tim Berners-Lee for a female individual or group making waves in the world of open data. This is the third year […]

A group of leading open data standards bodies have announced an exciting new collaboration to tackle a shared problem: how to accurately identify organisations. The identify-org initiative was launched on Friday 7th October at the International Open Data Conference (IODC) in Madrid. It brings together key organisations driving standards for open data across a range […]

Finding detailed information about UK grantmaking – who is funding, what, where and how much – has become much easier today with the launch of a new online search tool, called GrantNav. Free to use, the platform lets users search, explore and download grants data from some of the UK’s largest charitable funders. By making […]

360Giving’s campaign to open up UK grants data and make grantmaking more informed and effective has received a huge boost with a £745,000 award from the Big Lottery Fund. The major grant will enable 360Giving to pursue its ‘moonshot’ ambition for 80% of UK grants to be made openly available by 2020. It will also […]

  As part of its commitment to modernising grant making, the Big Lottery Fund has provided 360Giving with a £50,000 development grant so it can take forward its ground-breaking work on open data in the grant making sector. Currently every funder has a different approach to capturing and managing data about those they support, making […]

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Rachel Rank as Chief Executive of 360Giving. Rachel joins us from Publish What You Fund where she has played a major role in advocating for open data standards in international development. She brings with her a deep knowledge of transparency issues and a track record of supporting donors […]

360Giving wants to free up 80% of the UK’s grants by value as open data.  So we need to encompass the biggest grant makers. We were delighted to work closely with BIG Lottery officers and recently their Chief Executive Dawn Austwick to begin publishing their impressive grant record as basic open data (on which, more […]

Foundation transparency: why it matters A huge amount of work has gone into making international aid flows more open, resulting in the International Aid Transparency Initiative. The work was led by the UK, yet domestic grants made by UK foundations remain opaque. Why is it that I can look up where the UK government or […]

Sometimes open data on grant making just pops up unexpectedly.  I was giving evidence to the Warwick Commission on Cultural Value and spent some time poking around in the Arts Council England’s website looking for strategy and policy documents as well as any open data they may have.  ACE has a good research capability but […]

I gave evidence to the Warwick Commission today on a range of digital issues and philanthropy. The digital stuff i cover over there but here is the section on philanthropy and transparency.  I call in particular for the Arts Council England, which publishes its grants to publish also the evidence and evaluations they hold for […]

In our view at Indigo, to achieve our objectives we cannot lead the argument with open data itself. Open data is a critical enabler to achieve benefits. It is the benefits that appeal to senior grant makers only rarely the data itself.  An update on activity since the kick off meeting. Nominet Trust, BIG and Indigo […]

BIG Lottery Fund is the largest of the organisations that distributes money from the state-sanctioned Lottery  in the UK. They have given a helpful response to my two FOI requests.  I made two probing requests – one for a set of grants data from a geographic unit of manageable size and one for the nature of data […]

It isn’t always easy for large organisations to just open the floodgates and pour data out.   There’s always a host of compliance issues, some real, some over-cautious.  Tim Berners-Lee’s original, highly readable 2009 article on bureaucracies and open data acknowledges this and urges them just to publish, not spend years agonising: Just do it…There […]

Indigo Trust hosted a meeting at its offices to discus open data, philanthropy, grant making and the principles underpinning this blog.  The minutes will be published in due course, the following attended: Simon Marshall Big Lottery Funding Cathy Pharoah Cass Business School Owen Barder Centre for Global Development Beth Breeze Centre for Philanthropy – Kent […]

In 2010, Esmee Fairbairn a leading grant maker in the social justice area held a futures event.  One team took Esmee’s grant information from their website (where it was published in pdf documents) and turned it into a database.  By turning the data into a versatile database, instead of static documents they were able to […]