Grant recipients
Exploring the data with:
Using data provided by grantmakers using the 360Giving Data Standard, we can explore the types of organisations that receive grant funding. For the purpose of this section we are only looking at grants to organisations with award dates in 2022-23 available in the published data by April 2024. This totals around 87,000 grants.
Note that grants identified as being awarded for further regranting have been excluded from this analysis as we do not have the information on the eventual recipients and the size of the initial awards for onward distribution may skew the grantmaking picture.
Type of recipients
Looking at the legal form of recipients, not all can be identified. There are around 22,000 grants where the type of recipient is unknown. This could mean that the organisation is too small to have a registered charity number or other registration, but it also includes those organisations where the funder has not recorded or published their registration number.
Most of the figures on this page relate to registered charities, who are the recipients of 45% of grants in our 2022-23 corpus and received 22% of the total grant amount. Nearly 21,000 unique registered charities have been identified as receiving a grant in 2022-23. The second largest group is universities, who are the recipients of 17% of grants but 32% of the total grant amount.
Size of recipients
Where grant recipients are charities, we can use data from the Charity Commission register to look at the size of organisations that have received grants. The most common grant recipient size is charities with an annual income between £100k and £1m. This is larger than the profile of all charities on the register – as you might expect, unfunded organisations are smaller in profile.
Geographical analysis
Grant recipient country
For charity recipients, the majority of grants (84%) were received in England, with 9% received in Scotland.
This data is slightly skewed by which funders publish their data and should not be read as an absolute indication of where funds are distributed. For example, not all community foundations publish their data so there are geographical disparities in data available that might not reflect disparities in funds distributed. Scotland is under-represented because the Scottish Government has not published its grants data, but all central government departments for England have.
Geographical scope
Using the “area of operation” recorded in the regulator data, we explored the geographical scope of the organisations funded. Reflecting that the profile of funded organisations were slightly larger than all registered charities, we see that a higher proportion of organisations funded were operating at a regional and national level. This is to be anticipated as a proportion of local charities will be grassroots community groups and campaigns which might not require funding in the form of grants to deliver their activities, and conversely, many of the national organisations funded are likely to have received grants from multiple funders.
Communities served
Using data about the communities served recorded in regulator data and comparing all recipients to all charities, there are proportionally more grants for all specific groups except “other charities”. When comparing all recipients to specific segments, the Government provides more grants to recipients serving the general public, and fundraising grantmakers provide more grants to recipients serving children and young people and disabled people, and fewer to the general public.
Themes
Based on themes reported in regulator data when comparing all recipients to all charities, there are proportionally more grants for education, poverty, health, disability, and community development, and proportionally fewer for religious activities, overseas aid and animals. When comparing all recipients to specific segments, the Government provides a higher proportion of grants to recipients working on education, arts, and the environment than other funders.
Multiple grants
Number of grants awarded
We are able to explore the number of grants awarded to recipients in the available data. It should be noted that many will have received more than shown if they received instalments of multi-year grants awarded in previous years or received grants from organisations that do not yet publish their data, including local authorities.
Recipients with a large number of grants received tend to be universities, housing associations and other large institutions.
Who funds with who
There is an ecosystem of funding between different funders. In the diagram below, the thicker the chord, the more recipients the funders have in common.
Grants
Thanks to grantmakers publishing data using the 360Giving Data Standard, we can analyse the characteristics of grantmaking, by looking at the size and duration of awarded grants.
Grant duration
Grant duration is an optional field in the 360Giving Data Standard so not all publishers have included it in their data. The duration of the grant is available in the structured data for around 35% of grants. Looking at the grant descriptions, it is likely that the majority of those with no duration recorded are one-off or short-term grants.
Fundraising grantmakers, family and corporate foundations are more likely to offer longer grants of over 12 months, while small grantmakers and community foundations offer shorter-term grants.
There has only been a marginal increase in the proportion of grants of over a year in duration over the last year – although this may have been affected by the profile of organisations publishing their data. The evidence for the benefits of multi-year funding are well documented(2) and charities have reported challenges in securing multi-year grants following the pandemic.
There is more to do to improve the volume and quality of data available on the duration of grants as this has a significant impact on our understanding of the grantmaking patterns and interpretation of the amounts.
Grant amount
The median size of published grants is £10,000. This varies between grantmaker segments, with central government generally making larger grants whilst small grantmakers and community foundations make smaller grants.
However, note that the grants included are not of a consistent duration so an award amount might be for a few months or over five years. Information on grant duration is not consistently available enough for us to produce the yearly amount of grants received.
In total 2% of grants are for over £1m (this represents around 1,500 grants), but these account for half of the amount granted. Most grants are small – over half of grants made are for £10,000 or less.
These patterns are also reflected in the proportion of grants made that are worth more than £100,000. Central government and family foundations are more likely to make larger grants, while corporate and community foundations are less likely to make large grants.
The size of grant is not always correlated to the size of organisation and some larger organisations are receiving a number of smaller grants. If you switch the chart below from the number of grants to the grant amount, you will see the change in impact that these small grants make to the organisations overall grant income.
Explore the data further
Explore the data in GrantNav, 360Giving’s search engine for grants!