About this report

A starting point

This report uses data published by funders about the grants they made between March 2020 and October 2021 during the Coronavirus pandemic to understand how they and wider civil society responded during that time.

360Giving believes that by understanding the data, decisions and the direction of the funding community, we can help the sector and communities as they continue to recover from and respond to the impacts of the pandemic.

By openly sharing data about their funding, grantmakers are able to respond better to emergencies such as the pandemic. Furthermore, sharing more and higher quality data about grant funding will improve overall charitable giving.

This report aims to be a starting point for the exploration of the data collected on Covid relief and recovery grants. You can click on links on every page to view interactive visualisations to explore the data.

Values

This research has been guided by 360Giving's five organisational values:

1. Purposeful - We're focused on driving meaningful change in philanthropy for charities, and improving outcomes for communities and good causes across the UK.
2. Open - We are open in our approach: we share ideas, challenges and lessons with others, and are open to feedback and committed to improvement.
3. Curious - We're inquisitive and we believe in using evidence.
4. Collaborative - We work with funders, charities, researchers, analysts and developers to achieve our objectives, and strive to support them to deliver theirs.
5. Inclusive - We make data, our tools and support accessible to all.

We believe that by sharing the data we have collected, what worked - and crucially, what didn't - that this report aligns to all of our organisational values.

Covid relief and recovery grants

The 2020 Coronavirus pandemic provided a unique challenge to UK charities and the people and communities they serve. Charities needed to meet the massive demand and need for their services, particularly from their most vulnerable users. Yet simultaneously they had to completely stop many of their in-person services and fundraising activities to keep their staff, volunteers and service users safe.

Grantmakers recognised the scale and urgency of this emergency, and responded by designing and deploying new grant programmes, as well as adapting existing grants and programmes. These programmes aimed both to:

• Help organisations meet the increased and unique demands created by the pandemic
• Help organisations ensure their own survival given anticipated drops in other funding sources

360Giving supported grantmakers to publish data about the grants they had made. We created the COVID-19 Grants Tracker which aggregated the published grants data in a single tool, and enabled collaboration and intelligence sharing between grantmakers.

About 360Giving

Our mission is to help UK funders publish open, standardised grants data, and empower people to use it to improve charitable giving.

When funders publish information on who, where and what they fund in the 360Giving Data Standard it means they are sharing it in a way that others can access and use for free. Because the data is standardised, it can be looked at and analysed all together, helping us to see and understand grantmaking across the UK. Having this information means funding can be more informed and effective.

We support people to publish their data in the 360Giving Data Standard. We also help people to access and use the data, and have created tools to make it easy to explore, download and visualise the data.

You can find out more about 360Giving on our website, or search and explore published grants data using GrantNav and 360Insights.