Methodology and data

Introduction

This is the second year of the UKGrantmaking project and we have implemented a number of changes to the approach and the platform, based on our learning from the 2024 edition and reader feedback.

We have used the best data available to us at the time of publication, and while all reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, we cannot guarantee this. We welcome feedback on the quality of the data and the approach.

The number of organisations and the amount of grantmaking included in the figures are higher than those reported in the previous edition of UKGrantmaking in some segments, particularly fundraising grantmakers. More grantmaking foundations were identified for this edition than the previous year due to additional unpublished data from annual returns shared by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, which greatly supported our analysis. Where we have included comparison figures and percentage increases, these are for the restated figures for 2022-23 with the additional data, and include the percentage increase in figures, where data is available, for both financial years for the current active organisations to compare like with like.

Segmentation

The segmentation has been designed in a way to support alignment with other research and analysis, where possible. All organisations identified for inclusion in the analysis were allocated to a single segment. This allocation involves an element of judgement based on the information and data available – and requests for changes to segments from some foundations following the last edition. There are a number of grey areas where segments might overlap or where there wasn’t enough information available. This means that the segments are indicative only in order to help understanding of the overall picture.

Category	Segment	Description	Examples
Trusts and Foundations	Community foundation	Public charity that typically focuses on supporting a geographic area, primarily by facilitating and pooling donations used to address community needs.	Community Foundation North East, Quartet Community Foundation
	Corporate foundation	Charitable foundations set up by businesses with funding from endowments, annual covenants, or gifts.	Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales, Vodafone Foundation
	Family foundation	Foundations funded principally by the personal gift of an individual donor, family or family business, whether they have a living family member on the Board or not.	Pears Foundation, Tudor Trust
	Wellcome Trust	Has its origins as a family foundation, but is so large that it is included in a segment of its own to avoid distorting the overall picture.	The Wellcome Trust
	Fundraising grantmaker	Organisations who raise money from the public in order to make grants, often through specific appeals or as placed-based/thematic giving schemes.	BBC Children in Need, Rosa, People’s Postcode Lottery
	Member/Trade Funded	Foundations funded by industry or trade bodies and members, including Livery Companies.	The Clothworkers Foundation, Transport Benevolent Fund
	Government/Lottery- Endowed trust	Foundations established by the government or National Lottery distributors, but independent of them.	NESTA, Local Trust, Power to Change Trust, Youth Endowment Fund
	General foundation	Other trusts and foundations.	John Lyon’s Charity, Henry Smith Charity

Charities	Charity	Grantmaking alongside other charitable services or in the support of a single cause or institution.	Motability, AMREF, Cancer Research UK, Solace Women’s Aid
Charities	NHS/Hospital foundation	Hospital foundations and related charities that make grants to support health work including those that make grants to some organisations outside the NHS.	Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity, Imperial Health Charity
Government	Central	Whitehall Department	Ministry of Defence, Department for Education
	Local	Local council within the UK. Includes unitary authorities; district, county, or parish councils; and combined authorities.	Manchester City Council, Greater London Authority
	Devolved	Devolved government within the UK. Country only (combined authorities are part of local authorities).	Scottish Government, Welsh Government, Northern Ireland Executive
	Arms Length Body	Body attached to a central government department or a non departmental government body. Not including National Lottery distributors.	UK Research and Innovation, Natural England
National Lottery	National Lottery distributor	Distributor of National Lottery funding. Also sometimes distribute government and other funds.	National Lottery Community Fund, Arts Council England
Other	Donor-Advised Fund	A charitable vehicle whose main purpose is tax-effective giving for a range of donors who direct the grantmaking. Includes donation platforms where the donor specifies the charity.	Master Charitable Trust, Charities Aid Foundation
	Company	A private company that makes some grants directly from the company rather than through a separate foundation.	JP Morgan

Excluded organisations

“Friends of” “PTAs” and fundraising subsidiaries of charities
School trusts
Organisations with an income AND grantmaking expenditure of under £5k

In addition, there were some organisations that were not deliberately excluded, but do not appear in these segments due to being very difficult to identify in publicly available information.

Data sources

Grantmakers

The primary source of data about UK grantmakers is the three regulators of charities: the Charity Commission for England and Wales (CCEW), Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland (CCNI). Data extracts from each of these regulators was used to construct a list of possible grantmakers, which we then manually checked and cleaned through the process described below.

Where possible, we checked information given to the regulators against the organisations’ annual accounts and made amendments if necessary.

In the case of small organisations that were not required to complete an annual return to their charity regulator and therefore the grantmaking expenditure was not available, we used the organisational expenditure.

We sourced data on grantmakers that are not registered charities (for example central government or National Lottery distributors) from data published by those organisations.

We also checked the list of grantmakers against other data sources, including membership lists of partner organisations (the Association of Charitable Foundations, the Association of Charitable Organisations, UK Community Foundations and London Funders), regional funder network membership, and 360Giving’s register of grantmakers who publish data using the 360Giving Data Standard.

Figures for grantmakers who are not registered charities have been taken from data they have published about their grantmaking, where available.

The estimated total for local authority giving in the Grantmaking Picture is derived from the Directory of Social Change Grants for Good research, which you can read more about in their blog: What’s happening with local authority grantmaking?

The estimated total for company giving in the Grantmaking Picture section is derived from the Directory of Social Change Guide to UK Company Giving 2023-24. It identified 178 companies giving around £324m in all cash contributions, excluding gifts-in-kind, so may be over-estimating the voluntary grant amount. Companies are no longer required to declare cash donations in their own reports and accounts, and only 221 of the 404 companies in the Guide provided data on community contributions, which includes cash and in-kind donations. In their own reporting, some companies even neglect to report donations made to their associated corporate foundation. As a result, it is difficult to put a precise figure on the total value of cash donations (or ‘grants’) made by companies, but this is likely in the low hundreds of millions – less than commonly perceived.

Calculations

The platform provides percentage change figures only for organisations with current and previous year figures. This means that the percentage change value may differ from raw calculations made from the summary table.

Figures are provided as per their reported values, unless we have stated an inflation adjusted figure. A rate of 5.7% calculated from the Consumer Price Index (looking at months and quarters for the fiscal year) was used for adjusting to 2023-24 values. An average inflationary rate across the year was used due to grantmakers having different year ends.

Grants

Data on grants comes from data published by grantmakers using the 360Giving Data Standard by April 2025, which may not include all grants made by the grantmaker in the period. It relates to grants recorded as awarded between April 2023 and March 2024, including the full value of multi-year grants, so the awarded amounts may not match the accounting in the statutory figures used for the total for each grantmaker.

This data was supplemented by grantmaking data from National Lottery distributors published on the National Lottery grants database because not all lottery distributors publish their data using the 360Giving Data Standard. We deduplicated this data with other data published in the 360Giving Data Standard by National Lottery distributors, using the 360Giving data version when available.

A number of large government grants were excluded from the analysis as they were less relevant to our understanding of the civil society grantmaking picture or might have skewed this understanding. We excluded grants where they were government-to-government transfers, either between central government and other government departments or from central government to local authorities or other statutory providers. Other exclusions included grants to schools, private sector organisations and international institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations.

Recipients

The recipient information is only available on grants published using the 360Giving Data Standard, and so does not correspond to the grantmaking reported in the overall grantmaking picture.

We added data on grant recipients using the organisation identifiers (such as charity number) included in the data published by grantmakers. Where a grant recipient can be matched to a charity record, we used the charity’s record from the charity regulators to add financial and demographic details about that charity. This includes details of the country based on the postcode of the charity’s registered office, the income and size of the charities and in England and Wales, the charity classifications including the communities served, the themes and, for the London Focus analysis, the geographical area of operation.

Challenges and learning

Implementing learning

As this was the second year of the project we were able to implement improvements based on learning from the previous edition. For example:

We had a solid base of data and an approach that was easier to build on and we developed a new database to improve the efficiency of the data processing and management.
It was easier to get feedback and input from stakeholders for something which was already a tangible product, and this supported better engagement during the development process.
Enhancements to the platform, including new table formats and the new blog functionality, provide a more in-depth narrative and help to improve the navigation.

The process was also greatly improved by the Charity Commission for England and Wales (CCEW) sharing additional unpublished data from the annual returns for 2023 and 2024 which improved the quality of the data and reduced the volume of manual checking we needed to. This made a particularly significant difference to our understanding of grants to individuals and families. Previously only grants to institutions were recorded in the annual returns, and only by larger foundations. The new data included grants to individuals as well, and included the data for a wider range of organisations.

With the platform and funding in place we were able to start the planning and delivery a lot earlier in the year to provide more time for some parts of the process, but were greatly hindered by staff turnover during the period, with a new interim project manager and a new data analyst. This impacted some developments.

There was one part of the plans for the edition that we weren’t able to implement at all, and that is having sections on the different UK nations in the way that we did in London. Unfortunately, we do not have enough coverage in Scotland and Northern Ireland of grantmakers using the 360Giving Data Standard to be able to analyse the grants in a meaningful way. We have had a few meetings, but made limited progress in the devolved governments in Scotland and Northern Ireland publishing their data, and we haven’t had as many other funders publishing their data as we had hoped. This is still something we are keen to do in the 2026 edition and will proactively support the publication of data.

Challenges in the data on grantmakers/grantmaking

As with the previous edition, there were a number of challenges in the data itself. This included identifying both the organisations to be included, and establishing the amount of their grantmaking:

Difficulty identifying active grantmakers: A high number of organisations are classified on the CCEW register as making grants and it is difficult to establish which are more significant in their grantmaking for analysis in the report. As at May 2025, there were 49,280 active registered charities recorded as making grants to organisations and 34,752 to individuals with 61,391 having selected either or both the boxes. There were 20,723 charities which recorded that their “Main way of carrying out purposes is grant making”. This is a high volume of organisations and these are just the figures for England and Wales.
Inconsistent data available: There is inconsistency in the depth and quality of the data between the charity regulators. In particular, the data from OSCR (the Scottish Charity Regulator) was inconsistent and often the records did not include a PDF of the statutory accounts to enable the manual collection of figures.
Poor quality data: The quality of the annual return data available was inconsistent in some places as it is manually entered each year by the charities with limited validation. As a result, a significant amount of manual verification from the PDF statutory accounts was required – and surprisingly a number of grantmaker accounts were not Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) compliant, making it challenging to identify the correct figures.
Lack of data available on smaller funders: Different questions are asked in the charity regulator annual returns based on the size of organisations, but in general the majority of questions, apart from those about income and expenditure, are only required for those with an income above £500k. This means that some organisations with substantial grantmaking but direct income under £500k are not required to complete the additional information, including their grants to institutions and their assets. This contributed to the high level of manual verification required.
Changes to legal forms and asset transfers: A number of funders had a new charity number and registration record, generally due to incorporating or merging different funds. Not all of these were included on the Charity Commission Register of Mergers. Some were included in the governance notes on the register as an asset transfer. In some cases, this made it difficult to match records to prior year figures to understand trends.
Limited data on funders not registered as charitable trusts: It was difficult to get data on known grantmakers which were not registered charities. In particular, devolved governments and local authorities. Many councils are still failing to follow the recommendations set out in the Local Authority Transparency Code 2015 on the publication of information about grants awarded to voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations.
Lack of data standards for corporate giving: No data is available on corporate giving, outside the corporate foundations who are registered as separate entities. The amount is not required to be disclosed in company accounts and, where it is, it is often reported as a Corporate Social Responsibility total which made it difficult to distinguish grants from volunteering time, employee fundraising/donation matching and in-kind support.
Difficulty disaggregating group accounts: Data for some organisations was not disaggregated in statutory accounts to make it easy to report. This was the case for some private companies but also some giving schemes or grantmaking initiatives that were part of another organisation.

We used external data sources to support the identification of organisations that make grants to the voluntary and community sector, and then used manual verification to establish missing grantmaking totals. With over 20,000 organisations identified in the regulator registers with a main purpose of grantmaking, it was necessary to take a proportionate approach, focusing on the largest organisations.

Challenges in the data on grants and recipients

Availability of published data: Not all grantmakers publish their data using the 360Giving Data Standard. In some cases we were able to source data that was broadly aligned, such as grantmaking data from National Lottery distributors published on the National Lottery grants database, to include data from major funders such as Arts Council England who have yet to publish their data using the 360Giving Data Standard. However, for some grantmakers there was no data available in any consistent way on the total amounts distributed, or on the details of the recipients and the grants – for example the majority of local authorities. We will be working on a long-term plan to address gaps in the data.
Availability of data in the timeframe: A number of grantmakers committed to publishing their data and perhaps had even done so in the past, but at the time of the analysis in April 2025 had not published their data for grants awarded in 2023-24. This particularly impacted our analysis of community foundation recipients as 32 of the 46 accredited community foundations published their data using the 360Giving Data Standard, but only 24 of these had done so for the 2023-24 financial year.
Availability of data on grants to individuals: Although momentum is building on publishing data on grants to individuals, a new feature of the 360Giving Data Standard introduced in December 2022, not enough had been published for the 2023-24 financial year alone to be included in the analysis in any informative way. We have included the data for 2022-23 and 2023-24 together to provide an illustrative picture. This is an area that we hope to expand in future editions.
Data quality: The quality of the grants data published is inconsistent. Almost two-thirds of grants lacked duration information, making it difficult to put awarded grant amounts into context for the period. Some funders did not consistently use charity numbers or other external identifiers so it was difficult to identify the recipient organisations and provide additional information about them. During the year, 360Giving will provide support to publishers of grants data to improve the quantity and quality of the data to increase its usefulness.
Regulator register quality: Where we could identify organisations from their charity or other registration number and match to external data to find out more about the organisations, the quality of the data on the registers was not always strong. For example, on the CCEW, many charities have selected a high number of classifications and it is unclear what their main activities are to be able to understand the data in any meaningful way – for example, 57% of all charities have selected that they support “children and young people”.
Availability of external registers: Where organisations are not registered charities, it is not always possible to find out more about the organisations and this impacts our understanding of the grantmaking picture. For example an unregistered organisation could be very small and below the threshold for registration, it could be an exempt or excepted charity, some of which are very large such as national museums or it could simply be one where the funder has not recorded the information. 360Giving will be exploring ways to support improved use of external identifiers and increased availability of registers to better understand organisations being funded in the future.
Geographical data limitations: It was difficult to provide detailed geographical analysis based on the data available. Most grant records do not include information about the intended area of benefit for a grant. Although the 360Giving Data Standard had a new feature of location scope introduced in 2022, this is not yet available in enough of the published data to be used. As a result, most commonly only the location of the recipient organisation is known. This means that geographical analysis is commonly skewed by where national and regional charities are based and not where the delivery of activities and people supported are located. For this reason, in this analysis we explored the approach in the London focus section of using the Charity Commission Area of Operation to better understand the geographical scope of organisations as a potential approach to wider geographical analysis in future editions.

Future developments

We are committed to this as a long-term project that will grow and evolve over time. We will look at trends over a longer time period, and increase the depth of the analysis now that we have the foundations of UKGrantmaking in place. We currently have a London focus, and we plan to develop the analysis with deep dives into other areas or specific topics and we welcome potential partners and suggestions for other priorities for exploration.

We will also develop approaches to improve the quantity and quality of data available in the longer term, working with stakeholders and partners.

Please share your suggestions of what you would like to see in future editions or provide feedback for improvement.

Amendments to data

Every effort has been made to support the data to be as accurate as possible with the information that was available to us at the time of analysis. Our approach will evolve and improve over time as we work to address the challenges in data quality and availability noted above.

We welcome feedback on inaccuracies to support us to develop and enhance our approach for future editions.

If you have identified inaccuracies in your data, your name, segmentation, or you are missing from UKGrantmaking and feel you ought to be included, then please let us know. Please complete our simple amendment request form.

Unfortunately, due to the way that the data is linked and used for calculations, it is not possible to make amendments in the current edition. However, we will review all suggested changes and keep a record of those that will be made in the future editions.

The changes recorded to date are saved in this Google Sheet. We have published this list of amendments for transparency and so that users of the full data set can reflect the changes for their own data use.

Full data

360Giving is committed to open data.

The data in all the tables and charts used in this report can be downloaded from the tables directly in their relevant sections.

A full list of all the grantmakers featured in this report is available to download:

UKGrantmaking 2025: List of grantmakers (4 MB, XLSX)

You may wish to review the amendments recorded above, which have not been changed in this dataset.

The grants data used in this report is available on GrantNav or on the National Lottery grants database.