Technical users and the 360Giving Datastore and API

This page is designed to help developers, data analysts, other technical users and technical partners of funders access and use grants data published using the 360Giving Data Standard.

360Giving Data Standard

The 360Giving Data Standard is a specification for sharing grants data. The Standard is applicable to two formats: tabular data (spreadsheets) and JSON. The JSON version is the canonical Data Standard, but the Standard operates the same across both formats.

Organisations publish data about grants they have made using this Standard. They can choose the file format they publish, either in Spreadsheets using Excel, CSV, OpenDocument Spreadsheet or using JSON.

The Standard is maintained on Github, based on decisions made by the Standard Stewardship Committee.

• Standard on Github
• Standard documentation
• Reference for the available fields

Data registry

In order to help grantmakers, developers and analysts discover and use 360Giving data, 360Giving maintains a register of data on our Data Registry. The Data Registry contains a list of the data known to have been published using the 360Giving Data Standard (that is both valid and licensed as open data), along with details of who has published it. All the files on the register should conform to the 360Giving Data Standard.

The majority of publishers (more than 90%) publish their data in Spreadsheet format – mostly using Excel. You can download files directly from the Registry if you wish to use them in their original format. The Registry sits within the 360Giving Data Quality Dashboard, which also contains information about the quality of the data for each publisher and in aggregate.

Registry feed

There is also a JSON feed of files published using 360Giving the Data Standard. This file is updated daily and includes current publishers that have notified 360Giving that they have published data. The JSON is an array of objects in the following format (based on DCAT):

Metadata feed

360Giving provides a JSON feed that contains metadata about files in the Registry, including file statistics (such as size, location, validity against the Standard), aggregate statistics (including total grants, values, and dates) and useful insights (including organisation identifier schemes used).

A coverage JSON report is also available, which contains the contents of status.json plus coverage reports on field usage for each dataset.

Additionally, a CSV report is available, which contains a subset of the fields available in the JSON feed, focussed on the aggregate statistics.

Using the data

We recommend booking a free 1-1 Data Support call where we can support you to understand how to use the data, and how the 360Giving dataset can help to answer your questions or develop your understanding of how to tackle a data project.

Book a 1-1 Data support call

Using data from individual publishers’ files

Most 360Giving Data Standard data files are published in XLSX format, with a small number published as CSV and OpenDocument Spreadsheet or JSON data. The Data Registry provides separate download links for each file in its original file format.

When handling multiple files, you’ll need to bear in mind that not all files will contain the same columns. As well as the required fields that all valid data must include and any optional fields from the Standard, publishers have flexibility to include additional non-standard fields based on their needs. So when merging multiple files together you’ll need to ensure you account for each file having different columns in a different order.

360Giving Datastore & API

The 360Giving Datastore and API offer convenient ways for developers, researchers and others to access grants data published using the 360Giving Data Standard.

The Datastore is updated every night by fetching data from every file on the 360Giving Data Registry and includes some data enrichment. GrantNav and 360Insights are then updated based on the latest available data. The API runs from this Datastore.

Accessing the data via the API

The API provides a streamlined and simplified way to access 360Giving data. For technical users who wish to use the data in their own analysis or software applications, we recommend using the API to query the Datastore. Potential uses of the API include:

• Displaying 360Giving grants data in your grantmaking system or software.
• Helping with due diligence checks for grant applicants.
• Using 360Giving data to build an application that leverages the data (e.g. providing information on funded charities).
• Showing grants received by your organisation.

The API is designed to facilitate getting specific data frequently (for example all grants given or received by a particular organisation).

You can read more detailed information about the API, including signing up for important updates and the terms of use.

Access the API

Accessing the Datastore directly

For users with more complex data needs, it is possible to directly access the Datastore and run queries on it. Potential uses of the Datastore include:

• Creating a filtered dataset as raw data for a research project.
• Producing a bespoke dataset that can be regularly imported into a database powering a web app.

The Datastore is designed to facilitate one-off or repeating data transfers covering a large part of the 360Giving data corpus.

You can read more detailed information about the Datastore – including the Datastore access request form and code of conduct which you must agree to to gain access.

Access the Datastore

GrantNav data

GrantNav is a web tool developed by 360Giving which provides a search interface for grants data published using the 360Giving Data Standard.

The 360Giving Datastore offers the best route for bulk access to 360Giving data. However, GrantNav offers access to the entire GrantNav dataset as CSV or JSON (warning: links will download large files).

The whole dataset is several hundred MB and growing, so we recommend that you store the data locally for your own application to work from. The data is updated daily from the 360Giving Datastore. A list of all datasets and the date on which they were last updated is maintained on GrantNav.

Please note that while this file contains all of the publishers’ data in one tabular or JSON format, not all 360Giving data is necessarily included. Any files that fail validation, or aren’t available under a suitably open licence (ie, one that permits re-use for any purpose) aren’t included. This means that all data in GrantNav is valid against the 360Giving Data Standard, and is available for re-use for any purpose.

In addition, this dataset does not contain all of the original fields that were published by the publisher. It contains only the fields that are relevant to GrantNav’s work. If you want to look at the original data, please download the files you are interested in from the Data Registry. You can also find out more about what is included in the export files.

The dataset also contains augmented or enriched data that is not present in the original dataset – for example, additional location data such as ‘ward’ and ‘region’ are added to grant records in order to enable some of GrantNav’s filtering options to work. See the ‘Data used in GrantNav’ page for a full reference of all the data used in creating GrantNav, and the licence under which the GrantNav data can be used. You must attribute GrantNav if you use the data, see our guidance on how to do this.

360Giving Data Quality Tool

The 360Giving Data Quality Tool allows you to upload, paste or provide a link to data in the 360Giving Data Standard format, and this application will convert between JSON, Excel and CSV formats, allowing you to download the original file (and the converted versions). For publishers, the Tool inspects key information from the data so you can check if data is valid against the 360Giving Data Standard schema and also receive feedback on aspects of data quality.

The Data Quality Tool works with Flatten-Tool, which converts single or multi-sheet spreadsheets to a JSON document and back again, allowing a dataset to be round-tripped between structured JSON and tabular data packages or spreadsheets: providing a bridge between richly structured datasets and accessible flat formats.

360Insights

The 360Insights tool produces aggregate data based on a selection of 360Giving data, or the whole dataset if no filters are set. This data is augmented with information about recipient organisations from Find That Charity as well as location information from Find That Postcode.

Once a selection has been made in 360Insights, some results can be opened in GrantNav and downloaded in Excel or CSV format for further analysis.

Data Quality Dashboard

The Quality Dashboard tool produces aggregate data based on the 360Giving dataset as a whole, and by Publisher of the data, about features of the data such as the use of geocodes, organisation identifiers and programme names.

License

All JSON feeds linked from this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Organisations publishing data using the 360Giving Data Standard may use the 360Giving publisher badges provided by 360Giving to tell the world that they publish open grants data and are part of the open grants movement. Non-publishers referring to or using 360Giving data may not use the 360Giving logo or 360Giving publisher badges without permission. More information about publisher badges can be found in the After you’ve published section of our website. 

Contributing to 360Giving software

360Giving has several open source applications, available at github.com/threesixtygiving. You are more than welcome to send feedback, comments and pull requests to any of them.

Guidance is available on how to contribute to our GitHub repositories, you can also get in touch with us directly if you have any questions.

GrantNav is open source software developed by Open Data Services for 360Giving. You can find the source code for GrantNav on GitHub.

360Insights is open source software developed by David Kane and 360Giving. You can find the source code for 360Insights on GitHub.

All other software used and developed by 360Giving is available through the 360Giving GitHub organisation.

Contact us

If you’re developing an application that uses 360Giving data, we’d love to hear from you – email us at labs@threesixtygiving.org.