Have your say! How your feedback shapes our work
Find out how your feedback has guided our work and help inform our plans.
The survey for 2023-24 is now closed – but if you have any more ideas for how we can improve at any time, please do contact us. We’d love to hear from you.
Your feedback matters!
To inform our priorities and improve our work, we’re keen to learn more about what it is that you need from us. Tell us what you think of 360Giving’s work and share your ideas and insights to help shape our upcoming plans and help us monitor our performance and impact.
We hope you will take the time to complete our survey, spending just 10-15 minutes to tell us how we can better support you. Your feedback is really important to us, and as a small charity, it’s key to evidencing our impact to the funders who support 360Giving and make our work possible.
User focus
At 360Giving, we pride ourselves on being user-focused, and we embed user research in all our work so we can identify and prioritise the activities that will meet your needs. It’s an essential part of designing the products and services we offer in order to be focused and purposeful in delivery of our strategy, and importantly aligns to our values of being open, curious, collaborative and inclusive.
Monitoring and evaluation
In addition to making sure we set the right priorities for the future, our user and customer survey also helps us to monitor and evaluate our work so far. It’s just one part of our monitoring and evaluation framework but an important one – especially because we want our tools and services to be free, and many of them don’t require a login as this would make them less accessible. But this means that we don’t always know who the users are, and how the tools are being used, so we have to evaluate our success in different ways, like this survey.
How we’ve listened so far
We’ve made many changes as a result of feedback from users and customers in our previous strategy and outcomes surveys. Here are just a few features and services that we’ve developed in response to your feedback:
1. UKGrantmaking
We heard from users that they wanted an overview across the entire sector, situating our 360Giving data with other data about grantmakers, and to understand the context of grantmaking not yet appearing in the 360Giving grants data.
In 2023, we published our Snapshot analysis and will build on this in our UKGrantmaking project which we announced in a previous blog is coming out in June to address this understanding of the wider context.
Make sure you don’t miss the launch of UKGrantmaking by signing up to our newsletter.
2. Grants to individuals
Funders who give grants to individuals and families expressed a need to see their collective impact, but also see their work in the context of other grantmaking in communities.
We enhanced the 360Giving Data Standard by supporting grants to individuals to be published anonymously with other useful information. This will also support an improved understanding of the overall grantmaking picture.
Read Buttle’s blog about their experience and start publishing your grants to individuals.
3. Regranting
Data users and recipients of funds for regranting both expressed a need for clarity about flows of funding in the data. It’s now possible for funders who give grants intended for onward distribution to declare this in their data, so it’s clear the recipient will be regranting those funds.
Do get started using the regranting categories if you give funds for regranting.
4. Location enhancements
Data users expressed challenges in understanding the difference between where a grant is being spent/work is being delivered, and where the organisation receiving it might be based. Funders can now provide more context to where grants are being delivered with the addition of a Location Scope category, including specifying if the location isn’t relevant.
For example, data users previously couldn’t tell the difference between grants where the location information was missing and grants where it was omitted intentionally, but if the undefined location scope category was used in the data this would be easy to spot.
We are also working to further enhance our tools to make a distinction between the recipient location and the project delivery location, where both types of information have been provided, and exploring other ways that we can improve the understanding of geographical data.
5. More filters in GrantNav
We received feedback that people wanted to do more advanced queries in GrantNav, looking at different dimensions of the data, especially as the volume of data on GrantNav was growing.
In response to user feedback, we added a new filter which lets you filter by funding organisation type, and another which lets you select grants in GrantNav based on Programme names, which can be especially useful for cross-funder programmes or for funders that have different programmes for different causes.
We also improved the Recipients filter so that you can search for any grant recipient in the data, and made further refinements like ensuring organisations are no longer duplicated where one funder used their charity number and another used their company number.
Try it out in GrantNav, and join one of our Introduction to GrantNav workshops to get the most out of your grants searches.
6. 360Insights searching
We received feedback that people liked being able to visualise data in 360Insights, but weren’t able to get the most out of it. Originally, you had to upload a dataset yourself into 360Insights, which users told us they found difficult.
You can now explore any of the published 360Giving data in our visualisation tool 360Insights at the push of a button! You can even visualise your GrantNav searches in 360Insights.
7. Choose how you receive support
Last but not least, we’ve improved the variety of ways you can get in touch with us! We listened to funders who said they needed more options to access support to share and use the data. In addition to our Helpdesk being available via email, we’ve introduced a range of publisher workshops and it’s now easy to book 1-1 publisher support calls via our simple form. And even if you’re not a publisher, you can get in touch with us any time.
Thank you!
Thank you to those who previously shared their feedback in our annual customer surveys, user research, evaluations, or shared ideas in meetings or other contact with us. We really do value your time and input and review all the feedback in detail at least quarterly.
If you have any ideas of how we can improve at any time, please do contact us. We’d love to hear from you.