We worked with 360Giving to develop a robust API that makes it easier to access and use up to date data about grantmaking in the UK.
In the 2022-2023 financial year, over 13,000 UK grantmakers provided grants totaling over £20 billion. In the context of an economic crisis, where civil society faces rising demands and increased delivery costs, data about who, what and where grantmakers are funding can help ensure resources are directed to the people and causes that need them most.
Since 2015, we’ve partnered with 360Giving to make it easier to track, compare and understand the flow of funds across different sectors and regions. We’ve worked with them to design and build the 360Giving Data Standard, the data infrastructure needed to help grantmakers publish their data, and the tools needed to access and use that data to make grantmaking more informed, effective and strategic.
Our approach
We designed 360Giving’s data infrastructure to make it easy for grantmakers of all sizes to create data by adopting a “spreadsheet first” approach. To publish data, funders simply update a spreadsheet, save it, and upload it to a specific page on their website.
The 360Giving Data Pipeline then automatically fetches those spreadsheets, converts them to machine-readable JSON, validates that data against the data standard and loads it into the datastore. This automated process repeats daily, ensuring that fresh grantmaking data is accessible through 360Giving’s suite of tools - for example GrantNav, 360Insights, and a Python co-lab notebook.
In 2024, 360Giving wanted to make it easier to access live data, by building an Application Programming Interface (API). This approach would make it easier to build scripts that can analyse, visualise or combine the latest 360Giving data with other datasets, rather than working with a snapshot of the data in time.
We started by working with 360Giving to gather more in depth requirements for the API. We conducted user research with existing publishers and users of grants data to understand their needs. As a result of this research phase, it became clear that 360Giving wanted to provide access to their data with a robust, well documented and fast API.
Once we’d understood the needs of the API, we began to build. We worked with 360Giving to translate the user needs into technical requirements, and make sure we could deliver them in the budget they had set for the API. The result is a gold standard API that’s well documented, easy to search, and responds to queries in less than 0.5 milliseconds.
Building the API has also shown how developing a tool can help a data initiative better understand the service they provide to users. By providing access to data using an API, 360Giving is benefiting from a clearer view of how people use their data. This continuous feedback loop enables 360Giving to adapt and improve their service, ultimately increasing the value and impact of their data initiative.
The result
Since 2015, 360Giving has helped over 280 funders publish data about over 1 million grants worth over 286 billion pounds. This data is used to drive smarter, more strategic decisions about funding across the UK - for example, charities are using this data to identify potential funders, and grantmakers using the data to identify and fill funding gaps.
The importance of making this data easy to access and use is shown by tools like the Covid-19 and Cost of Living Grants Trackers, which provide daily insights about how funding is distributed around key issues in the UK.