I’m leaving 360Giving this week, and I’ve been reflecting on our progress over the past four years. When I started as CEO in November 2015, I was the organisation’s first employee. The initiative had been incubated by Nesta under the watchful eye of Alice Casey. It had recently registered as a charity and a handful of […]

To make the best use and impacts from data, organisations often need a culture shift. We talk a lot about the benefits of developing a data culture, but what does that mean? Here, Rachel Rank sets out the characteristics and how grantmakers can embed them in their own organisations. A group discussion at the launch […]

As many of you know, our CEO Rachel Rank is moving on in March this year. Rachel has been here since the beginning, and her unwavering dedication, energy and enthusiasm have been instrumental to our success so far. It has been wonderful to work under Rachel’s leadership, but as she said in her recent blogpost: […]

The term ‘left behind’ has featured increasingly in social policy discussions in recent years. Here, Stefan Noble from OCSI shares how they have been working with Local Trust to develop a quantitative measure of left-behind areas using open data. As part of this, for the first time, a Community Needs Index has been created, including […]

We are really proud of our board of trustees at 360Giving, especially how engaged and invested they are in our work. We chat with Manny Hothi, who joins our board in 2020, about his background in data and innovation, the single stat that shaped his career and what excites him about joining the open grants […]

Updated December 2022.  With Christmas around the corner, we haven’t just been eating endless mince pies. Well, we have been, daily, but we’ve also used our grants data search engine GrantNav to bring you some festive funding and grants yule love to get you in the Christmas spirit 🎄 By David Kane and Anna Scott […]

With the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games on the horizon, Birmingham City Council is working to understand what grantmaking currently looks like across the region. Here, Sam Milsom from Open Data Manchester shares how over three workshops he helped the council to better understand who is funding what and where, and where there is potential for […]

We are soon to launch a Data Champions programme [update: now launched] to connect and support people who are interested in helping their foundations to be more data-informed. Here, the programme facilitator Dirk Slater shares what happened at a recent taster workshop, bringing together grantmakers from across the UK for peer-learning, discussion and cake Data […]

After four hugely rewarding years at 360Giving, I have decided it’s time to hand over the reins to someone new. I’ll be leaving the organisation in spring 2020 once a new CEO has been appointed. I have very much enjoyed my time building 360Giving. After a year of incubation at Nesta under the watchful eye […]

Grants from government are a crucial part of the voluntary sector’s funding mix. In this post, David Kane uses identifiers to explore the 2017/18 government grants data and understand the types of organisations which received funding.   Updated data Since this blog was released, 16 central UK Government departments have published open data about the grants […]

Our first go at creating a network of data champions has revealed a thirst for connecting with others to use data for better grantmaking. In 2017, collaborating with UK Community Foundations we brought 10 people together for a data expedition and this sparked their interest in learning more together. In interviews we learned that as […]

Last month NCVO launched its 2019 Civil Society Almanac, which they describe as “a treasure trove of voluntary sector data” – and it is. As NCVO’s Stuart Etherington says in his introduction, “…such dispassionate analysis is an important way of holding a mirror up to what we do”. I agree, and I’m a huge fan […]

“We thought we were sharing data for the benefit of grantees, but now we realise that it benefits us too” When we heard that Patrick O’Kelly of the Clothworkers Foundation had been inspired at an event by a data visualisation, and saw how he’d created his own using 360Giving data, we invited him to tell […]

Joint press release, London, Monday 15 July 2019 The UK government has the opportunity to transform its use of data, but is missing the opportunity and risks falling behind other countries if it does not invest now, civil society groups have today said. In an open letter to the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, […]

This blog first appeared on Medium, as part of the Funding Utopia project, Exploring radical, transformative ideas for the future of UK grant funding.  At present, it’s not possible to find a complete dataset on all charitable grants provided in the UK. This means the huge financial flows from grantmakers to grantees are opaque. This […]

Progressive grantmaking organisations were given a boost today, with the commitment by The National Lottery Community Fund to support the development of open grants data resources for the next three years. The grant – totalling £490,000 – will enable 360Giving to deliver its new 3-year strategy, which focuses on helping grantmakers to use data in […]

It’s Small Charity Week again! Last year we did an analysis of small charities in Lambeth and Southwark and examined the grantmaking patterns. This year, thanks to our new 360Insights platform, we decided to go big and explore grantmaking to small charities across the whole of the UK in 2018. For the purposes of this […]

Guest blog by Max Rutherford, Head of Policy at the Association of Charitable Foundations. A few years ago while working at a charitable foundation, I was part of a group of trust and foundation representatives that secured a meeting with the then Justice Secretary to talk about prison reform. In advance of the meeting, we […]

Guest post by Marina Stedman of The Good Exchange A new research report into ‘Technology in the Charitable Sector’ has looked at the current charitable grant application and distribution landscape and revealed that hundreds of hours are being spent completing application forms per year, with just two in five being successful and two thirds of […]

This was first published by London Funders on their blog.  I was pleased to speak at London Funders’ first Big Network Day on 14th February. The room was filled with different kinds of grantmakers – local authorities, charitable trusts and foundations, corporate funders and hosted by the GLA – a fantastic mix of organisations that […]