How many times have you said “I wish we knew who was funding what in our area?” Maybe you’ve even been that brave volunteer who offered to try and pull the data together from whatever other group members could supply – and then regretted it. At 360Giving, one of the many reasons we are passionate […]

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 […]

By Leigh Dodds, Mark Owen Bath: Hacked is a volunteer-led open data project serving the community of Bath & North East Somerset. We run a data store to collect and share local data, and work with local organisations, including the council, to help explore the benefits of open data for our community. We host hackdays, […]

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 […]

Foundations, charities and trusts close. This is a reality for charitable organisations and philanthropists who’ve met their goals, merged or decided to spend out their funds for any number of reasons. Take the Northern Rock Foundation. An independent grantmaking charity, it aimed to improve quality of life in the North East of England and Cumbria. […]

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 […]

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for 360Giving, with three different but complementary events emphasising the need for good quality funding data. Firstly, there was the launch of the excellent Giving Trends report, co-written by ACF and CASS. As a newbie to the world of philanthropy, Giving Trends is my go-to report for learning […]

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 […]

The Foundation Center and Media Impact Funders have launched a new tool for visualising media grants: http://maps.foundationcenter.org/?acct=media. It plots foundations and grantees onto a global map, and enables reporting on the flow of funds to support a wide range of media and technology initiatives. The tool features data on grants dating back to 2009 and […]

Earlier this month the Lloyds Bank Foundation published data from over 4,000 grants made between 2010 and 2015 in line with 360Giving’s open data standard. It’s available as a spreadsheet to download from our website. In doing so, we have joined a growing band of grantmakers in the UK who are opening up their datasets […]

  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 […]

Last week we had the pleasure of presenting on the 360Giving project for an Open Data Institute Friday Lunchtime Lecture. Alice Casey and Tim Davies shared a history of the project, and the vision of supporting funders to make better decisions and seek greater impact through open sharing of grantmaking data. You can find a recording […]

360Giving is a non-profit data collaborative. Read more on our about page. At 360Giving we help funding bodies and charities to publish and better understand the value of open data. Much of what we have been doing has therefore been around raising awareness of the project among different groups ; building an interest among the […]

It’s been a while since I wrote here – we have been very busy working with grant makers to help foundations publish to the 360 data standard and, as part of that process understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the technical bits.  We’ve done a lot, mainly behind the scenes and there’s still lots to […]

Using 360giving standardised data we have worked with developers Aptivate to produce a grant navigator – GrantNav – that allows searching, charting and mapping of UK grant data from a dozen or more major grant makers. 360giving is about helping people publish data – we provide support, advice and a data standard that enables data […]

With our 360 partners NESTA, BIG Lottery, Nominet Trust and Practical Participation and we have been working quietly with leading grant makers, grant recipients and technologists for the last few months on publication of data to the 360giving standard. For grant makers this means helping them get data from their grant management systems into the […]

Fascinating morning at the launch of the Association of Charitable Foundations and CASS Business School report on the Top 300 UK Foundations Giving Trends.  It’s an excellent piece of work, but we were struck how much richer and easier the work would be if grant makers published their grants to an open data standard along […]