Data quality

Making sure data produced to the 360Giving Standard is of good quality is important if it is to be useful to others.

For data to be considered high quality, it needs to be:

• Comprehensive: The information you are publishing should be complete (though you don’t have to publish all your data in one go – you can do it in stages). In order to confirm data comprehensiveness, we provide tools to check which data fields grantmakers are publishing, and to give feedback on how to ensure all the information that users need is being provided according to the Standard.
• Timely: The data needs to be current, i.e. not only for historical activities but for grants that are being implemented at the moment.
• Accessible: Data should be publicly available in machine-readable format. The data should be released under an open licence (public domain or attribution-only) and users should be able to bulk export it. Grantmakers should actively promote access to and use of their data.
• Comparable: Data should be disaggregated and detailed to allow different users to access, use and compare it with other data sets in many ways. At present, the only standard that allows this for UK grants is the 360Giving Standard.

360Giving Data Quality tool

Checking spreadsheets, CSV files or JSON can be quite difficult for humans, but the 360Giving Standard is built in such a way that machines can do the checking for us. We have developed a tool to support you to both publish and use open grants data.

The 360Giving Data Quality tool enables you to:
• Convert 360Giving data between spreadsheet, CSV and JSON formats.
• Validate 360Giving data to check that it conforms to the 360Giving Standard.
• Explore 360Giving data – useful for those of us that cannot read JSON.

Anyone in the process of producing data can use the tool. And feel free to get in touch with our support team if you have any questions or need help: support@threesixtygiving.org.