A Forest of Funders
Exploring the landscape of UK grant funders through a handmade data visualisation
The challenge
Earlier this year 360Giving launched a Data Visualisation Challenge. 360Giving supports UK funders to open up their grants data. The data can be explored on the GrantNav platform. The challenge asked for data visualisations that answered one of two questions. The first question, and the focus of this article, is who has funded what themes throughout the years?
A forest of funders
In this data visualisation each tree represents a funder. There are 20 trees, one for each of the 20 largest funders. Together these organisations have awarded 98.5% of all funding recorded on the GrantNav platform.
Each tree embodies four characteristics of a funder: the number of grants they have awarded and their value (which determine the shape of the tree’s base), the years of available grant data (colour of the tree), the growth in funds awarded between 2014 and 2016 (top of the tree) and the distribution of their funds across eight themes (branches of the tree).
The diagram below provides more detail. It includes measurements so that anyone can create their own tree. Each tree is handmade from a single piece of paper. The visualisation was inspired by observing the large variety of funders. Much like a forest of trees, each funder is unique, and varies in their size, age and the themes on which they focus. The choice of paper reflects the fragile nature of the grant-giving landscape, where even large funders (such as the Northern Rock Foundation) can collapse.
Technical details
The values of each variable were grouped to aid clarity and to draw the viewer’s attention to the most substantial differences. The groups for each variable were determined by examining their distribution. Several variables, such as the value of grant funding, are heavily skewed. Grouping also ensures that the results for funding-by-theme are not viewed as being more accurate than broad estimates.
Keyword searches were used to determine the themes on which funders have focused. The set of themes was based on the ‘list of purposes’ compiled by the Charities Commission. These purposes were consolidated into eight themes, a set of keywords was created for each, and then these were searched on. This approach assumes that the themes are comprehensive and that the distribution of grants across themes is representative of all grants, including those without descriptions which may not be discoverable via keyword search.
The order of the themes (or branches) on the trees reflect the total funds that have been awarded to each theme by all funders in GrantNav. The first or lowest branch is for Science, Technology and Transport which attracted the greatest level of funding, while the top branch is for Human Rights and Justice which attracted the lowest level of funding.
Branching out from digital data visualisation
The visualisation created for this challenge is an example of a physical data visualisation. A physical data visualisation is simply an object that encodes data values within its attributes. Two familiar examples of physical data visualisations are mercury thermometers and world globes. Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen have compiled a large list of other examples.
While physical data visualisations are by no means new they are much less common than the digital variety. However, they can still be a highly effective communication tool, enabling data insights to be presented in a creative and accessible way.
Physical data visualisations force the creator to explore the data in detail when making or shaping the object. Exploring the data is essential to identify insights. In contrast, it is easy to create a digital chart without even looking at the data.
Physical visualisations also prevent the creator from using certain digital features that can obscure the ‘big picture’. For example, it is not possible to use drop-down menus — these require the viewer to memorise information in order to make comparisons. And it is not possible to add lots of printed numbers to a physical object — tables of printed numbers put the onus on the viewer to draw insights.
Finally, a physical data visualisation may make data feel more accessible and less intimidating to viewers, by using materials, reference points and methods that are familiar. In this case, anyone can ‘have a go’ at making their own tree. Moreover, one study on physical visualisations found that “moving visualizations to the physical world can improve users’ efficiency at information retrieval tasks”.
The landscape
The most striking insight is the enormous variety of trees — no two trees are the same — and this reflects the diverse nature of funders who vary in age, size, growth and focus.
Giants: The six tallest trees are for those funders who gave over £50 million per year of available data. They are the Big Lottery Fund, the Wellcome Trust, the Department for Transport, Sport England, Comic Relief and the Ministry of Justice. Together these six funders awarded 90% of the funds captured in the GrantNav database.
Rarities: The trees for the Gatsby Charitable Foundation and London Councils stand out as they have narrow bases relative to their height. That’s because both awarded a small number of very large grants, giving £2.3 million and £1.4 million per grant respectively. In contrast, the tree for the Robertson Trust has a very wide but short base. The Trust awarded a large number of small grants, giving the equivalent of £29k per grant.
A mixed picture for growth: The tops of trees show the direction of growth in the value of funds awarded between 2014 and 2016. Amongst the funders who reported data in both years, half increased their funding and half cut their funding. However for many funders (including those outside the top 20) there is no grant data available for either one or both years. For this reason, the funding of themes (discussed below) was not compared between years.
Who has funded what themes?
Funders
Most funders spread their focus over three or four themes. However two groups took a different approach.
Specialists: The Department for Transport, Sport England and the Ministry of Justice all concentrated their funding (over 80% in each case) on a single theme. Their trees each contain one branch that is particularly long. That said, a note of caution is due because, among these three organisations, only Sport England appear to have submitted recent grant data to the GrantNav platform.
Generalists: Another group of funders took the opposite approach by spreading their funding over many themes. The branches of their trees are more even in length than those of the specialists. Examples of Generalists include the Big Lottery Fund, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the City Bridge Trust and BBC Children in Need. Each gave at least 5% of their funding to six or more of the eight themes.
Themes
Science, Technology and Transport, which is the lowest branch on every tree, drew the focus of only a few large funders. Only six of the 20 funders gave more than 5% to this theme. However, among these six, all but one gave at least 20% of their funds. This may be because grant making in Science, Technology and Transport demands greater specialist knowledge than other themes.
Health and Education and Employment, which are represented by the second and third branches respectively, were a major focus for many funders. Four funders gave at least 40% of their funds to health-related projects: Comic Relief, the Henry Smith Charity, BBC Children in Need and City Bridge Trust. For Education and Employment, a majority of funders gave at least 20% of their funds to this theme.
Aside from Sport England, no funder gave more than 20% of their funding to Sport (the fourth branch). Similarly, for the theme of Human Rights and Justice (the top or eighth branch), the Tudor Trust was the only organisation amongst the 20 considered (aside from the Ministry of Justice) to give at least 20% of their funding to this theme.
Housing (the sixth branch) and Arts, Culture and Heritage (the seventh branch), attracted a variety of interest levels from the 20 largest funders. Both the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Gatsby Foundation gave the largest percentage of their funds to the Arts, Culture and Heritage theme, while many others gave at least 5%. For Housing, the funder who gave the single largest percentage of their funds was the, now defunct, Northern Rock Foundation. Other funders who focused on Housing include the Lloyds Bank Foundation and London Councils.
The absence of long branches for the Environment theme (the fifth branch) shows that none of the 20 funders awarded more than 20% to this theme. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (34th by total funding level) is the first funder to have given at least 20% to environmental causes.
Towards a clearer view
The results presented above are not without limitation. Below are two ideas to deliver more accurate and richer insights in the future.
The analysis above relied on keyword searches to identify the themes of grants. To improve accuracy funders could be asked to apply a set of ‘theme tags’ to each grant. Alternatively, the ‘description’ field for each grant could be made mandatory. This would improve the accuracy of search and enable methods such as topic modelling to discern the key themes. Regardless of the approach taken it is important not to force each grant into a single category, as many grants cut across multiple themes.
Grant data for a number of the largest funders appears to be missing, particularly for recent years. There is no data for BBC Children in Need for 2016 or 2017, and there is no 2017 grant data for both the Wolfson Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Encouraging large funders to share their data as soon as it is available would enable analysts to more quickly spot themes that are underfunded. Feeding those insights back to grant makers might allow them to take a more agile approach to funding.