 Hi, my name is Fran Perrin and I'm a philanthropist and it's a bit of an odd job because my job is to give away money. When I turned 18 I inherited wealth and with it to me the privilege and responsibility to give it away and to do as much good as I could with that money. But when you're 18 certainly for me I didn't know what I was doing in life at university let alone what it meant to be a strategic and effective donor maximising impact on the many social problems of the world. How would you pick your cause? What's the worthiest problem to solve if you have money? Should you give back to your local community? Should you give to parts of the developing world? Should you give to tiny start-up charities that are innovating? Should you give to large organisations that are delivering change at scale? Should you give single-year project funding or multi-year core funding? I didn't know the answers to any of those questions and I think more importantly I didn't know who to ask. Philanthropy matters and there was a lot for me to get my head around. Grantmaking in the UK and around the world has a long history of driving social progress, whether it's funding primary scientific research or supporting campaigns for greater human rights protection or prison reform. We're surrounded by thousands of charities, small and large, all doing different things to try and make their communities and the world better. But when there's a debate about the contribution of Philanthropy to society it's really really hard to point to any data about what's actually happening. I wanted to talk to other donors to ask them the really stupid questions. How did they pick where to give a grant? What organisations are good to work with? Where are their gaps? Where could my funding maybe make a difference? So I started doing what all funders do. I went to a lot of meetings. I spent a lot of time in donor collaboratives, in sector conferences like this and I just asked questions all the time and over many many years I worked out my version of that big picture which is that my foundation, the Indigo Trust, gives small grants to people doing data and tech projects to change the world and we give up to a million pounds a year. Every time I made a grant I got on the phone and I asked other donors, is this a good charity? Will they use the money better than this other charity that also seems to be doing good stuff? And I read reports, a lot of reports. Most of the donors publish some kind of report to comply with the charity commission or just with public accounting. But we all publish it in our own different styles and quite often it's a lovely expensive glossy report with lots of pictures and maybe some nice stories. If you're very lucky and you've found our website, you might even be able to print off a PDF. Some of the reports have the very bare minimum, just the overall sum that was given away that year. This is obviously a waste of time for everybody and not just for the funders. Every hour there's a fundraiser, spends, trawling through these reports, printing them off, going through them with a red pen, is an hour taken away from them delivering the kind of change that we want to fund. Charities spend precious time and resources searching for the information and each charity doing the same kind of research, writing hundreds of funding proposals that we're busy rejecting because they don't meet the criteria that we haven't told you about. It doesn't have to be like this. I wanted to be able to Google that data to find out what other people were doing. So I asked the stupid question, why isn't there an open data standard for UK philanthropy? And colleagues at Nesta and Nominet Trust started asking the same question. We wanted a world where donors and charities can get accurate, useful information to power more effective philanthropy, where funds are matched projects based on the best available information, where donors can learn from failure and success. So I went out and I started talking to other foundations and philanthropists and I thought I would get a very negative response. This is not a sector that's known for its fast pace of change. But donors actually started to respond and say, we get the potential benefits of this. What do we do next? And I promised them that we were just finalising the details and I would get straight back to them to tell them how they could share their data. So we went to the amazing Tim Davies, Ben Webb, Stephen Flowers and all the guys at Open Data Services Co-operative and said, would you mind building us a data standard and a registry and all of that? And of course they did. It's the 360 giving data standard. It's on our website, along with the registry, along with all the resources that foundations need to start publishing. And they are. More and more UK foundations are publishing their grants to the 360 data standard. At the moment it's in a very rough format and Alice is going to tell you all about what happens next. So you've heard the rationale, why we think this is really important work. All of that activity going on and people not able to co-ordinate and pull it together effectively. So 360 giving, the idea behind it is to turn that idea and that rationale into a reality. And when things go from ideas and the drawing board to reality, what you need is a great team behind you. And we've had a fantastic group of people who all bring a different piece of knowledge and experience to make this thing happen. So we formed an informal steering group and got together to start working up ideas. This began about two years ago with a conversation between Fran, a husband, Will, who are both trustees of Indigo Trust and myself, and this data standard that they had started to work on with Tim and Co at Open Data Services. And we started to look around to other funding bodies like Big Lottery Fund and what are they doing with their data. There's a great guy called Simon Marshall at Big Lottery who started to use the data standard and experiment with their enormous data set and to understand where all that funding is going around the country. And also working with Norma Nett Trust who also applied the data standard to their own data and started walking the talk and acting as if they were going to be a data driven funding body. So this is the way it began two years ago. We started to do two things as a steering group together. We started to look back on the possible, what had already been done on data standards. This is the supply end of the data. It was something that Tim and Stephen and everyone at Open Data Services had been working on in the past. How could you use a data standard in the international aid sector to think about and understand funding flows in that space? This is Iati which some of you may have heard of. So we began by building on what we already knew about. We also didn't look just at the supply of data and thinking about what had happened before on supply. We began to ask around. We did this informally and we began to find that there was a great demand for the data too. And it wasn't just from grant makers. We began with grant makers but we found plenty of other demand for this data. So grant makers wanted to obviously understand all of the issues that Fran just mentioned. How am I spending my money? How should I enter new areas? How do I know I'm making a difference? But we also found lots of researchers, NCBO, charitable bodies and trusts who were trying to set up a research arm and understand the sector as a whole, what was happening. Government obviously as well are going to be very interested in this. They're a huge grant giving force in the UK. And also the grant seekers last but very much not least. All of that time spent looking up this information. We could make their lives so much easier and also release a huge amount of time to do more good work in the communities. So we had an open door to push on and we began to formalise some of this activity, get together and start to form a bit of an organisation for a 360 to sit within and to formalise the standard and to work more on the standard. And part of that was also providing the support to the funding bodies. And it's been just a brilliant success so far. We've really been surprised at how funding bodies have responded to our interest in this area. These are just a few examples of some of the funders who have come and taken part and started to reorganise their data into the standard format to work with it. Trafford council, you won't be surprised they're on there too. They're also a grant giver. A big lottery fund I mentioned earlier, one of the most enormous grant making bodies in the UK. The Wolfson Foundation, a private philanthropic organisation, a trust, they don't have to take part in this at all. It's their choice. They can see the utility in what we're trying to do here. And I can say as of this morning that we have 26 organisations publishing now to the standard. It's really big bodies in there making up £2.6 billion worth of data. That's a lot of money and it's a lot of potential impact that we want to understand. So we've got the supply side and we've been supporting the funding bodies to start publishing that data and creating a flow of data. And there's more work to be happening there. But the thing we have also been very aware of, particularly learning lessons from ATI and from other data openness initiatives, that we really need to work on in tandem how is this data useful, how to demonstrate to people really clearly that there's a utility for the data. And this is where the idea for a data labs project came along. So we are working on 360 giving labs and you'll see here just a few screenshots of some examples of different types of products that we've been looking at. So a very popular one is for funders in the bottom right corner there to go in and check what each other is doing and to cross reference their data. Lots of people are also very interested in from the grant seekers perspective how can I go and find out what projects are eligible, what might be eligible for, what funding streams can I access. So we've got a couple of funder finders. We've got NCBO, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations using the data to understand the community and voluntary landscape better. This is just the beginning and next year we've got a big year for 360. You heard about the journey so far where Fran first began by looking at this problem. How do I as an individual start to enter this market and understand how to make best impact with my money to becoming an informal steering group and testing informally with other organisations, the demand and the supply for the data. And now finally we're at this fantastic stage where we've shown that there is demand. We've got a supply coming through of this data and we are ready to really make things go and scale things up. So we've got a new chief executive who's just started this week, Rachael Branc, from both what you fund. We've got a tech team with some resource behind them. So all of the open data services guys are going to be working with us throughout the next year to develop this further and make things happen. And the important thing without which we can do any of this, we know that we have some demand and we know that we have some supply. So we believe really strongly that you cannot just go out there pushing one side of this. You can't just create products and you can't just create lots of data. The two things won't add up to a hill of beans. We can't achieve much with that on its own. So we need to ensure that lots of different types of organisation and lots of different types of ideas come together to make this project really grow next year and become really useful to people. So the relevance of what we do is something we think about all the time. We want everyone here to feel that you can come forward and take part in the project, give us ideas. We're very open and collaborative in the way we work. And so we'd love you to get in touch with any questions now or after this session today. Thank you so much Alice and Paul Frans. I think we might have time for one really quick question. If you could say your name and where you're from. Ychwanelai'n adnod, Thompson Reuters, R&D. Do you have any thoughts about standardising impact metrics or are you talking to particular groups about that? I'd be quite interested to learn more about that. We are thinking about it constantly but I've been to so many conferences that talk about measuring impact and yet have no input data at all. And I'd really like to get the data on where the money's going before we then analyse whether it's working or not. But the way that we're building the standard is so that we can layer that in. If you have evaluation reports, if you have impact data, you'll be able to link to that to point to that. But we're not going to insist that it's there at the very first stage. But some of the major foundations that we're working with are really keen to get that data out there. They haven't had a platform to do it before and we hope we can help with that.