On Tuesday I was lucky enough to take part in a Kingston "Data Day", organised by the fantastic Superhighways and Kingston Voluntary Action.
The aim of the day was to showcase some of the work that charities in Kingston are already doing to use data in their work, and see some of the tools and resources out there. We heard from charities like LEAH, Man and Boy and Kingston Young Carers about how they were using data to measure outcomes and improve their services. We also heard from Kingston Borough Council, 360 Giving and others on resources out there that local charities could tap into.
I gave a quick presentation on what the 360 Giving data on grants tells us about voluntary sector funding in Kingston. Here's a few things I took away from the data:
1. Grants to Kingston are lower than other areas
I didn't actually produce any comparisons for Kingston and other London boroughs, but in Katherine from 360 Giving's presentation she showed that looking at the Grantnav 360 Giving data, Kingston comes right at the bottom of the table in terms of the number of grants made.
You can see this for yourself when looking at a list of all the grants to London (see the "Recipient District" filter on the left hand side for counts in each Borough).
2. The Big Lottery Fund is important to the area
The Big Lottery Fund is by far the largest funder that has published 360 Giving data, and this shows in Kingston. Half of the grant amount received by organisations in the borough comes from Big Lottery Fund.
3. But other funders play important roles
Funders like the Co-operative Group, Sports England and Kingston Voluntary Action (through the Love Kingston programme) also provide key funding, particularly to smaller groups.
4. Grants are going to medium-sized groups
Most grants that we found are going to organisations with between £100,000 and £1m annual income. These organisations provide vital services in the local area, but there could be scope for increasing the funding available for smaller groups.
I've created a map of all the grants to Kingston that is embedded below:
You can also find my presentation on Google slides:
Finally you can also download the full dataset to use yourself:
This data is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA) in accordance with the terms under which the data was used from GrantNav.
Acknowledgements and data licensing
All data has been used under the license applied by the data publisher. A list of the licenses used can be found on GrantNav.
Contains data from GrantNav a 360Giving application released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license (CC-BY-SA)
