Data that influences how funding flows
Clear and accessible information about how funding flows is essential to making funding work better for communities. Open data helps funders understand the wider funding context, make more informed decisions, and identify how and when to come together to support communities and good causes as effectively as possible. Change that is grounded in the analysis and use of evidence is more likely to be durable, more equitable and more responsive to genuine need. This conviction sits at the heart of what 360Giving, now part of Funders Together, has been building for a decade. And it is increasingly shaping how funders across think about the relationship between open data, evidence and impact.
Seeing the full picture
The 360Giving community has now shared open grants data representing over £300 billion worth of funding, a figure that has tripled since 2021. This includes eighteen central government departments who publish their grants data using the 360Giving Data Standard, adding a layer of public funding to the picture that was previously invisible. The result is a more complete view of how money moves toward communities than has ever existed before. For the first time, through UKGrantmaking, that scale of activity can be seen, analysed and understood in one place. Funders, policymakers, researchers and communities can explore who is funding what, where grants are reaching and where they are not. This is not data for its own sake. It is the foundation on which better decisions are made: where to direct resources, how to avoid duplication, how to find the gaps that no single funder would otherwise see.
Over 14,000 UK grant makers provided grants worth over £24 billion in 2024-25.
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From openness to action
When funders publish their data openly, something shifts in the relationship between them and the communities they serve. Transparency creates accountability and allows grant-seekers, researchers and community organisations to understand the landscape of funding around them. It helps them to make the case, with evidence, for what is missing. Analysis from UKGrantmaking, for example, shows that National Lottery distributors give the highest proportion of grants to small charities, and that community foundations support more local charities than any other type of grantmaker. These are not simply interesting observations. They are the kind of evidence that can inform funder priorities, support better policy-making and help the whole sector understand where it is serving communities well, and where it can do more. The Foundation Practice Rating, developed independently, now uses participation in 360Giving as a key measure of transparency, assessing funders on diversity, accountability and openness. Sharing data has become expected good practice, and now analysis such as UKGrantmaking, aims to make using the data accessible to all.
“When funders can see what others are doing, they can do more together than any of them could do alone.”
The infrastructure behind the insight
360Giving, now part of Funders Together, has spent a decade building the infrastructure that makes this possible: the data standard that allows grants to be compared across organisations, the GrantNav search tool that makes grants data freely searchable, and the UKGrantmaking platform that brings the whole picture together in one place. Founded in 2015 by philanthropist Fran Perrin OBE, 360Giving was built on a simple conviction: that a more transparent funding sector would be a more effective one. Ten years on, that conviction has been borne out. Hundreds of organisations now publish their grants openly. The data is used by charities planning applications, by researchers mapping need, by policymakers designing programmes and by funders wanting to understand the landscape they are part of. As part of Funders Together, 360Giving's data infrastructure connects with funder networks, the programmes of Collaboration Circle and the place-based expertise of the Centre for Place-Based Giving. Data and practice, connected.
What comes next
Open data is a foundation, not a destination. The questions it opens up are as important as the answers it provides. How does funding flow in relation to need? Which communities are consistently under-served, and why? How do public and philanthropic funding combine, or fail to? How does what funders learn from data shape how they work alongside communities? These are the questions Funders Together is working on. Supporting more funders to share data and using this to build a funding sector that is more responsive, more equitable and more connected to what communities need. A sector where evidence does not just sit in reports but travels freely, shaping decisions at every level. The ambition is a funding system where decisions are connected with what else is happening around it, and where communities have the information they need to hold funders accountable and make the case for change.
