intro to 360giving - bond transparency working group

"We think that the foundation should have glass pockets."Russell Leffingwell, Chair, Carnegie Corporation, 1952

Where it all began…

We can map who can receive grants (with some effort)

But not who is already supporting these organisations and for what

Leads to a long slow process of experiment and discovery

Increases barriers to effective, strategic philanthropy

How can we help philanthropists in general in recognition of this (unexpected) award

Transparency for Nairobi, but not Norwich….

We all publish annual reports……

That usually describe our grants…

But finding out what grants we make is a manual, labour intensive and inexact process

We spend a lot of time in donor collectives just working out what each other is doing now and in the past

To get a picture of grant making across a sector, theme, place, country etc. is a huge task

…and grant makers, grantees and analysts can quickly and cheaply build a picture of what’s going on.

We want to make this sort of thing cheaper and easier to deliver

360Giving is an initiative by a consortium of grant makers to encourage UK domestic grant makers to publish their data

It’s happening….

Our ambition is that within 5 reporting years 80% of grants made by UK charities, foundations & other grant makers are reported as open data to agreed standards:

• Creating a clear information landscape for grant-makers in the UK showing who has funded what, with how much and for what

• Building transparency for the public, taxpayers and authorities

• Leading to improved effectiveness in grant making and greater scope for informed strategic philanthropy

What do we want?

Steps in building 360giving (hyperlinks)

• Develop a data standard• Test it with some data• Get some data for testing• Do something with the standardised data• Talk with some academic analysts• Bring more partners on board

Things we don’t yet have (July 2014):

• Registry• Non-360 products i.e. things other people have built

using 360 data• Fully worked through all the issues• A .org to run it• Highly granular data – it’s early days yet

Things we don’t want

• A paid for library model• Regulatory backing• Explicit government backing