Data Fix: Do’s and Don’ts for Data Mapping & More!
Kati Neiheisel is the eReporting liaison at Foundation Center. eReporting allows funders to quickly and easily tell their stories and improve philanthropy by sharing grants data.
This post is part of a series intended to improve the data available for and about philanthropy.
As many of you know, Foundation Center was established to provide transparency for the field of philanthropy. A key part of this mission is collecting, indexing, and aggregating millions of grants each year. In recent years this laborious process has become more streamlined thanks to technology, auto-coding, and to those of you who directly report your grants data to us. Your participation also increases the timeliness and accuracy of the data.
Today, over 1300 funders worldwide share grants data directly with Foundation Center. Over the 20 years we've been collecting this data, we've encountered some issues concerning the basic fields required. To make sharing data even quicker and easier, we've put together some dos and don'ts focusing on three areas that may seem straightforward, but often cause confusion.
Location Data for Accurate Mapping and Matching
Quite simply, to map your grants data we need location information! And we need location information for more than mapping. We also use this information to ensure we are matching data to the correct organizations in our database. To help us do this even more accurately, we encourage you to provide as much location data as possible. This also helps you by increasing the usability of your own data when running your own analyses or data visualizations.
| DO | DON'T |
| Do supply Recipient City for U.S. and non-U.S. Recipients. | Don't forget to supply Recipient Address and Recipient Postal Code, if possible. |
| Do supply Recipient State for U.S. Recipients. | Don't supply post office box in place of street address for Recipient Address, if possible. |
| Do supply Recipient Country for non-U.S. Recipients. | Don't confuse Recipient location (where the check was sent) with Geographic Area Served (where the service will be provided). |
What's Your Type? Authorized or Paid?
Two types of grant amounts can be reported: Authorized amounts (new grants authorized in a given fiscal year, including the full amount of grants that may be paid over multiple years) or Paid amounts (as grants would appear in your IRS tax form). You can report on either one of these types of amounts – we just need to know which one you are using: Authorized or Paid.
| DO | DON'T |
| Do indicate if you are reporting on Authorized or Paid amounts. | Don't send more than one column of Amounts in your report – either Authorized or Paid for the entire list. |
| Do remain consistent from year to year with sending either Authorized amounts or Paid amounts to prevent duplication of grants. | Don't forget to include Grant Duration (in months) or Grant Start Date and Grant End Date, if possible. |
| Do report the type of Currency of the amount listed, if not US Dollars. | Don't include more than one amount per grant. |
The Essential Fiscal Year
An accurate Fiscal Year is essential since we publish grants data by fiscal year in our data-driven tools and content-rich platforms such as those developed by Foundation Landscapes, including Funding the Ocean, SDG Funders, Equal Footing and Youth Giving. Fiscal Year can be reported with a year (2018) or date range (07/01/2017-06/31/2018), but both formats will appear in published products as YEAR AWARDED: 2018.
| DO | DON'T |
| Do include the Fiscal Year in which the grants were either Authorized or Paid by you, the funder. | Don't provide the Fiscal Year of the Recipient organization. |
| Do format your Fiscal Year as a year (2018) or a date range (07/01/2017-06/31/2018). | Don't forget, for off-calendar fiscal years, the last year of the date range is the Fiscal Year: 07/01/2017-06/31/2018 = 2018. |
More Tips to Come!
I hope you have a better understanding of these three areas of data to be shared through Foundation Center eReporting. Moving forward, we'll explore the required fields of Recipient Name and Grant Description, as well as high priority fields such as Geographic Area Served. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. Thank you! And don't forget, the data you share IS making a difference!
-- Kati Neiheisel
