Insights from open data and grantmaking data into the funding base of the third sector

• In Event: New insights into third sector resources

Abstract

There is a growing movement towards making data publicly available and voluntary and nonprofit organisations are often in the lead in such initiatives, in the interests of transparency. The use of such data, and making it more widely available, provides both opportunities and potential challenges (Hall et al., 2012). Such data could enhance our knowledge of the funding streams received by nonprofit organisations, overcoming some well-known barriers in the classification of revenues (Kane et al, 2013). Statistical and research agencies in the UK are working to enhance academic and practitioner capacity to access and enhance such data (UK Statistics Authority, 2011).
In the UK a number of foundations have released data on their awards, while the government has mandated the release of procurement data from public authorities. This allows work to be done on the distribution of funding to nonprofit organisations which will clarify the nature of their income sources. We provide evidence from initial UK research on this topic. We have linked information on several hundred thousand grants and contracts to our own extensive databases on charities and other nonprofit organisations. Grants data have been made available through the efforts of 360 Degree Giving – see http://www.threesixtygiving.org/ - including several years’ award information from some of the largest funders in the UK, such as the Big Lottery Fund (for which we have data on c. 120 000 grants over a ten-year period). We have linked these to our own databases on registered charities and assessed the distribution of awards in relation to the characteristics and distribution of charities in terms of size, location, and field of activity. In addition, the lists of awards are also informative about emerging organisations (since being formally registered as a charity is not a prerequisite for receiving an award from some of these funders), allowing us to determine patterns of organisational dynamism across communities, and also to comment on the extent of the “dark matter” of the voluntary sector revealed by these data sources (Horton Smith, 1997).
We also discuss the potential for use of application data and the risks associated with it, since such data could underpin valuable analyses of the effects of grants on charities.
Further, we use recently-released information from government departments, which comprises information about a wider range of nonprofit agencies including social enterprises, to assess the distribution of public spending by local and central government on the funding of the voluntary sector.
Our conclusions relate to the potential of and pitfalls associated with such linkage, including assessments that might be made of the distributional effects of awards and contracts. This is am emerging area of theory and practice, which has considerable potential for funders and third sector stakeholders, and we believe this to be one of the first projects to exploit data released in this way.

Authors

• John Mohan, Third Sector Research Centre

• David Kane