Innovations Post-Granting: Opening Data About Grants, Grantors, and Grantees
Our next three posts in this series focus on grantmaking innovations post-granting. Earlier posts look at specific types of innovations before and during the grantmaking process. Our introduction to the series explains the importance of open grantmaking innovations and why they matter for improving the legitimacy and effectiveness of grant-based public investments.
Summary: When others can easily discover and manipulate data about what activities are funded in a given region, population, or issue, this has the potential to avoid duplication of investment, decrease fraud and abuse, enable better analysis of impact, and create a marketplace so that other funders can match funds or support non-winning proposals.
When data about grants, grantors, grantees, and their grant-funded work product is made open and available to the public, the entire funding ecosystem benefits. Grantors get the chance to learn about what’s already been funded and with what impact, helping guide future investment decisions. Grantees, in turn, can use demonstrated successes (and funding commitments) to attract follow-on funding. Future applicants can study past grant decisions to improve their understanding of a funder’s priorities and patterns of investment. And citizens get the benefit of greater transparency about what their tax dollars are accomplishing.
While the United States does notyet have such a system in place, the United Kingdom’s commitment to opening the outputs of publicly funded research — because these outputs offer “significant social and economic benefits as well as aiding the development of new research” — speaks to the potential of such an open system for grantmaking.
However, despite increasing awareness of the benefits of openness, and some encouraging steps in the right direction, we have a ways to go before open grantmaking data becomes the norm.
For instance, although the federal government already makes grant callsavailable via grants.gov, there is no agreement to disclose data about grants once awarded. For example, in 2010, the philanthropic world was in an uproar about whether it was appropriate for the White House to release the names of applicants or winners in connection with the awarding of $50 million in social innovation grants. There is no consensus yet on what kinds of grant data (applicants, awardees, impact reports, etc.) should be transparent, and therefore no parallel global movement, but various disclosure initiatives are proliferating in the public and philanthropic sectors.
Some federal agencies, such as the National Institute of Health, are making information about grant awards available as raw, machine-readable open data via the data.gov open data portal. Each month, the agency publishes data about the type of projects funded, the area of research, the lead researchers, and their organizations. The Department of Education’s Investing in Education (i3) program posts all relevant application materials, and also posts overview information after each closing date about the number of applications received and the list of applicants. When the program announces the highest-rated applicants each fall, these applicants’ project narratives and technical review forms are posted on the website along with an overview document that discusses the i3 competitions for that year.
Interestingly, the Department of Education’s unusually open process allowed for several large national foundations to conduct a parallel vetting process of i3 applicants to award their own separate grants. These foundations adopted streamlined procedures for board approval of projects that had initially gone through the i3 process and put aside funds for applicants that made the cut. “In the end,” comments Foundation Center, “large foundations were critical to the success of the i3 matching-grant requirement, but each individual organization followed its own guidelines and approval processes and made its grants directly to their grantees.” As the i3 experience suggests, one potential benefit for grantees to making award data transparent is the ability to create a marketplace so that other funders can match funds or support non-winning proposals. For funders, opening up an after-market decreases the costs of grant administration because they get to piggyback on an existing process.
Opening up data about grantmaking (including in the philanthropic sector) is also translating into improved understanding of the impact of such investments. Glasspockets, an initiative led by Foundation Center, champions greater philanthropic transparency by aggregating and sharing information on the financials, governance, grantmaking, and performance assessment of grantmaking organizations, and provides tools to help them become more transparent. Additionally, Glasspockets is also home to the Reporting Commitment Initiative, in which currently a total of 19 U.S. foundations aim to improve the quality of grants information by advancing transparency and open data. Grant information is reported at least quarterly (daily in some cases) by each foundation, coded for geographic focus, and made available on Glasspockets, which includes an interactive map of the data that illustrates the national and global reach of America’s largest foundations. All data is completely open and can be downloaded through an API. In the public sector, a joint effort of the NIH and NSF, which make the data about the grants they give available as open data via data.gov, have launched the STAR METRICS initiative. STAR METRICS is a first of its kind effort to measure the concrete impact of federally-funded scientific research on the economy and on downstream innovations.
Hopefully, as these open data initiatives demonstrate their value for the various participants in the grantmaking process, the move toward greater transparency will gain even more traction throughout government and beyond.
Why Do It:
- Improving grant effectiveness: Opening grantee data can allow resource-constrained agencies to give opportunities to third-party analysis to measure impact, detect fraud, etc.
- Inviting collaborators: When an agency creates an “after-market” based on open grantee data, other grantmaking entities inside and outside government can more easily multiply the impact of limited grant funding by matching funds.
- Promoting greater learning: Open grantee data could give the public an expansive new learning resource of information on public issues and potential solutions.
Why Not Do It:
- Privacy: Where confidentiality of applicants or their submission materials are of special concern, limitation on the openness of applicant/grantee data may be appropriate. This might not be a question of whether to open or not but what to open and when.
- Lack of infrastructure: Opening data, though a simple concept, requires significant resource investment and backend infrastructure. For open data mandates to be successful, significant investment must be made to create an infrastructure for storing and releasing data.
Click here for the second post in our series on innovations post-granting, or head back to the table of contents for an at-a-glance look at the whole publication.
