How to use 360Giving data to find funders

360Giving data is the open record of grants UK funders have already made: 1,565,468 of them from 355 funders on 26 October 2026, free on GrantNav. Used well, it answers the trust fundraiser's first question, which funders give to organisations like mine and how much, in an afternoon. This guide shows the four searches that do it.

What 360Giving data is

360Giving is the UK charity that helps funders publish their grants as open data in one format, the 360Giving Data Standard. Every record carries ten required fields: a grant identifier, title, description, currency, amount awarded, award date, the funding organisation's identifier and name, and the recipient organisation's identifier and name. The identifiers follow the org-id scheme, so a charity registered in England and Wales appears as GB-CHC- plus its charity number and a company as GB-COH- plus its company number. That is what lets the data be grouped by funder or recipient however the names were typed.

GrantNav is 360Giving's free search tool and the place most people meet the data. Its homepage on 26 October 2026 reported 1,565,468 grants to organisations, 255,271 grants to individuals, 355 funders and 458,875 recipient organisations, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. OpenGrant draws the same data into each publishing funder's facts page, with a link back to GrantNav. GrantNav vs OpenGrant explains how the two divide the work.

Search one: who funds work like yours

Start with a keyword search on GrantNav for the plainest description of your work, such as "youth mentoring", "food bank" or "domestic abuse". Filter by the region or local authority you work in and by the amount band that matches a realistic request. The results page lists grants; the Funders tab beside it counts how many of those grants each funder made. The funders at the top of that list are your first candidates.

Two cautions. Keyword searches depend on the words funders used in grant titles and descriptions, so run two or three variants. And a funder that appears often may do so because it publishes many small grants, so check the amount column before you get excited: Forever Manchester has published 2,397 grants to 360Giving with a typical recent grant of £2,500, which makes it a strong candidate for a £3,000 request and the wrong one for £30,000.

Search two: who funds organisations like yours

The second search starts from organisations rather than keywords. Think of three or four charities that do similar work to yours, in your area or elsewhere, and look each one up on GrantNav as a recipient. Its recipient page lists every published grant it has received, with the funder, amount and date. Funders that appear on two or three of those lists fund your kind of organisation on purpose. How to find out who funds a charity covers this search in detail, including what to do when the charity's funders do not publish.

OpenGrant's peers lookup automates the first step. Enter your own charity number and it finds organisations with similar registered purposes, then lists the publishing funders that have given to them, each linked to its funder page.

Search three: what the funder really gives

For each candidate, open its funder page, on GrantNav or on OpenGrant. GrantNav shows the number of grants, total amount, earliest and latest award, largest and smallest grant and a table of recipients. Esmée Fairbairn Foundation's page on 26 October 2026 showed 7,345 grants to organisations worth £786,621,894 between January 2008 and October 2026, from £1,000 to £4,178,557.

OpenGrant's funder page turns that into three numbers that matter for an application: the total published, a typical award calculated as the median of the 100 most recent grants, and the share of those recent grants that went to registered charities, unregistered groups or companies. For Esmée Fairbairn the median was £15,000 on the same day, well below its stated minimum of £30,000, because older and smaller grants are in the sample. The lesson is to read the median alongside the funder's current guidelines, and never to infer a typical award from a stated maximum. NCVO's guidance puts the general rule plainly: "Just because an organisation has funded projects similar to yours doesn't mean it will fund yours."

Download the funder's grants as a spreadsheet and sort by year and amount. You will see whether its giving is growing or shrinking, whether it funds in your region, whether it makes repeat grants to the same organisations, and what it calls its programmes. Those programme names are what to search for on its website.

Search four: is it open to you now

360Giving says nothing about whether a funder is accepting applications. A funder that published its 2025 grants in spring 2026 looks the same on GrantNav whether it has an open programme, a closed round or an invitation-only policy. So the fourth search leaves the data. Check the funder's website for an application route, and check its OpenGrant page, which lists any open or forthcoming scheme in OpenGrant's sources and states whether the funder accepts applications or works by invitation. Garfield Weston Foundation, with 18,799 published grants, accepts applications all year round. The Tudor Trust, with 3,674, said on 26 October 2026 that it has no written application process and invites organisations after its own research. Which UK trusts accept unsolicited applications explains how to tell the difference quickly.

Where the data stops

The gaps matter as much as the coverage. Only 355 funders publish. The National Lottery Community Fund has published 302,611 grants worth £13.4 billion and most large trusts publish, but tens of thousands of registered grant-making trusts publish nothing, and they are where much of the money for small charities sits. For those, the charity register and the accounts are the only record, and how to read a grant-making trust's accounts is the companion to this guide.

Publication also lags. A funder's latest published award may be a year old, and totals on OpenGrant and GrantNav can differ because one has fetched more recently or because a funder has two publisher records. Treat the GrantNav page linked from every OpenGrant funder page as the authoritative figure, and the fetch date shown on OpenGrant as the date the numbers were true.

A worked example

A fictional community charity in Lancashire runs a befriending service for older people and wants to raise £40,000 over two years. On GrantNav it searches "befriending" and "older people" filtered to the North West, and finds that two community foundations and three national trusts account for most grants between £5,000 and £25,000. On OpenGrant it runs the peers lookup on its own charity number and the same three trusts appear, with medians of £7,500, £15,000 and £20,000. It downloads each trust's grants, confirms all three have funded in Lancashire since 2024, and checks their websites: two accept applications on a rolling basis, one is closed until a spring round. The two open trusts go into the pipeline for November, the third for March, and the community foundations are approached for the first year's smaller costs.

Keeping the research fresh

Published data changes as funders add their latest year, so repeat search three for any funder you are about to approach, and note the fetch date in your tracker. OpenGrant refreshes 360Giving figures on its funder pages and shows the date; the same funder's live schemes update separately as its programmes open and close. The funders A to Z lists every funder OpenGrant knows, publishing or not, which is the quickest way to move from a name on GrantNav to its register facts.