Methodology

Where is the data from?

This report is based on data published using the 360Giving Data Standard by a range of grantmakers. The 360Giving Data Standard defines a standard format for publishing information about a grant, including the amount, the date of the grant, the recipient organisation and the funder. The data is published in an open format, which allows anyone to use the data.

The data covers grants made between the start of the Coronavirus pandemic in March 2020 and October 2021, although not all publishers have data covering the whole period.

As well as grant information published in the 360Giving Data Standard, this report supplements the main open dataset with data from key Covid funds that have not yet published in the Standard. These datasets include:

• Culture Recovery Fund (DCMS funds distributed by Arts Council England)
• Culture Recovery Fund for Heritage (DCMS funds distributed by National Lottery Heritage Fund)
• London Community Response (data provided by London Funders)

What data is missing?

The pandemic has provided an impetus for funders to publish data about their grant funding, in order to better coordinate their activities with the wider sector. However, not all funders who made grants during the pandemic have published data openly about their funding.

Where possible, these gaps were filled by accessing other data sources, either published by the funders themselves (but not in the 360Giving Data Standard) or by talking directly to the funders.

Some large grant schemes have not published data about their funds, and so cannot be included in the analysis here. This report should therefore be seen as an analysis of a large proportion of the grantmaking that happened during the pandemic, but not the totality.

In some cases there also may be duplicate records found in the data. This can happen where a funder took part in multiple collaborative efforts - this can lead to the information being published in more than one place. While all efforts were made to remove any duplicate grants, some may remain in the data.

Methodology

Data was sourced from the 360Giving Datastore in November 2021, and was supplemented with additional data from other sources. Where possible, an effort was made to add charity and company numbers to the data where they were not already included, in order to de-duplicate between different grant schemes.

To create a comparison dataset, data was downloaded from the 360Giving Datastore covering the period from January 2015 to the latest data in October 2021, including all grants that were published during that period.

The additional data was gathered from the open data published by Charity Commission for England and Wales, the Scottish Charity Regulator, the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland and Companies House to provide contextual data on charities and registered companies.

Where possible, organisation identifiers were standardised to make the consistent, for example by replacing company numbers with charity numbers where an organisation has both.

To prevent double-counting, grants were excluded where they were known to have been passed on to another grantmaker (that also publishes 360Giving data) for distribution. This was done by either looking for the charity numbers of known funders in the grant recipient field, or through manual identification of these grants. These grants are not included in the main analysis, although they are examined in the "regranting" section.

The estimates provided in this report are likely to be partial, in a number of different ways. The data published is not comprehensive, and does not always contain the fields needed for analysis. Note that while some data is drawn from the 360Giving Covid-19 Grants Tracker, the figures presented here will differ from the figures on the tracker.

360Giving works with data publishers to help them increase the quality and completeness of their grants data.

A list of all the data publishers included in the report is included as an appendix.

This research was conducted by David Kane with support from the whole 360Giving team.