Publishing grant data
Updated 9 August 2022
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This publication is available at /government/publications/open-standards-for-government/data-standard-for-grant-making
Use the for disclosing grant data in government organisations.
1. Summary of the standard鈥檚 use for government
Grant-makers in government need to be able to track their investments. The ThreeSixtyGiving standard allows you to publish open and structured grant data and provide grant-makers with a way of identifying and understanding what is happening to their money. This makes the data easier to understand and use for decision-making and learning across the charity sector and government.
The standard also:
- supports better collaboration and transparency in the UK charity sector
- provides an established specification for publishing structured data of financial transactions of grants
- supports publication of data in CSV format or for use in building services to access the data
- gives grant-makers the flexibility to customise the standard to their own processes while maintaining interoperability with other grant-makers鈥� data
The government chooses standards using the open standards approval process and the Open Standards Board has final approval. Read more about .
2. How this standard meets user needs
Users of the ThreeSixtyGiving standard are bodies that give grants to other organisations. This includes:
- public bodies such as government departments
- local authorities and lottery funders
- charitable trusts and foundations
Anyone can use the published data to conduct research. Those most likely to use this information include:
- organisations seeking funding sources
- organisations developing tools and platforms that include funding data
- academia
- journalists
- citizens
The standard meets different user needs鈥� because it has:
- all the mandatory fields helpful for analysing the flow of grants
- the ability to include extra fields so each grant-maker can add and customise what data they disclose
- a flat structure that makes it straightforward to publish data in the required format
- support for CSV and JSON for easy analysis by both developers and researchers
- supporting documentation to help introduce users new to grant-making
- a regular review and update of the standards by a
By using this standard organisations can:
- see all government grants in an open format and compare them with grants made by other funding organisations including local authorities, charitable trusts and foundations and the lottery funds
- have more well-structured, better quality data that supports better analysis and understanding of the flow of funds from government and independent funders
- use the published data to support decision-making and learning among different groups and in different contexts
3. How to use the standard
is a publishing framework which covers all the required functional needs within the core specification.
A ThreeSixtyGiving dataset is a relational dataset which represents one to many relationships and can be in a JSON or CSV file format. has 10 mandatory fields and more than 50 which can help provide more context on the grants.
You can use a .
To identify organisations, ThreeSixtyGiving builds on the code list, used in both International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and Open Contracting data. This code list supports joined-up data between grants, international aid and contracting.
ThreeSixtyGiving builds upon existing open standards, including JSON, CSV, UTF-8, and makes use of ISO 8601 compatible dates.