Publishing to 360Giving: a guide for funders

360Giving is the open standard that lets UK funders publish their grants in a common format, so the whole sector can see who funds what, where, and to whom. If you fund in the UK and you are not publishing, you are missing an easy way to improve transparency and your own data discipline at the same time.

Why publish

Three reasons funders give, in order of how often we hear them:

1. Transparency. Showing your grants builds trust with applicants, partners and the public.
2. Better decisions. Once data is published, tools like GrantNav let you and others see patterns across funders, including gaps and overlaps.
3. Internal hygiene. Publishing forces clean, structured records. Funders often find the discipline of publishing improves their own reporting.

What the standard expects

At its core, the 360Giving Data Standard asks for a consistent set of fields per grant: a unique identifier, the recipient organisation and its identifier where one exists, the amount, the award date, and a short description. There are optional fields for richer detail like locations and outcomes.

The two things people underestimate are identifiers and validation. A stable grant identifier and a correct recipient identifier (for example a GB-CHC charity number) are what make your data join up with everyone else's. And validating against the standard before you publish saves you from quietly shipping malformed data.

Make it a by-product, not a project

The mistake is treating publication as an annual scramble: export everything, wrestle it into the right shape, validate, fix, repeat. It does not have to be like that.

If your grant data is already structured, with recipient identifiers captured at decision time, publishing becomes a button rather than a project. The award amount, recipient and rationale are already there. You generate a compliant file, see a validation report, and publish.

A note on erasure

Open data and data protection can coexist. If you erase an organisation's personal data on request, your published records should be scrubbed to match, so you are not republishing details you were asked to remove. Handle this as part of erasure, not as an afterthought. We cover the mechanics in right to erasure for funders.

Grantledger publishes a round to the 360Giving standard with a validation report and a public funding dashboard, and reconciles the published figures back to your own records so the numbers always agree.