GivingData has always been a great tool for viewing data from your grants management software, primarily data from the MicroEdge GIFTS product. What we’ve found in working with our clients is that their data integration needs go beyond just being able to see their grants data more clearly. They need to be able to weave that data into and have it work alongside other data assets within their organizations. Today, most grants data is locked up in a database with limited capabilities for building custom functionality and capturing custom data. But in GivingData, we now have the ability to build custom data capture and workflow features while preserving your grants data in GIFTS just the way it is. In other words, you can add additional features like outcome measurement, finance data integration, advanced budgeting, or custom geocoding into your GivingData installation while preserving the integrity of your grants coding and transactions data in GIFTS.

The diagram below depicts GivingData’s revolutionary new data architecture:

Let’s consider a real-world example. Your evaluation team wishes to track the measurable outcomes being collected for your grants. You have some quantitative data (such as hard numbers that track against pre-determined indicators) and some qualitative data (such as internally performed assessments by evaluation or program staff). And you would like to see how your portfolios of grants are performing in aggregate against your indicators, and also you would like to be able to see the quantitative and qualitative results for each individual grant. In GivingData, all of this is now possible. Combining our new extensible data management capabilities with the already powerful and visually rich aggregation and reporting tools provides real-time views of this data in formats that work the way your organization works.

We recognize that driving decision-making from your data (that is, truly being a “data-informed” organization) requires more than just being able to capture and store it. If your grantmaking data is locked up inside a system with an inflexible set of tools for end users, you may as well not have that data at all. GivingData has always provided insights and intelligence on your grantmaking data. And now it provides ways to capture additional data, and seamlessly integrate it with your grants data.

If you think you’re limited by your grants management system, think again.

For a demonstration of what GivingData can do you for your organization, contact us at 617.500.3399 or info@GivingData.com.

To see where GivingData is featured and learn more about the APIs, visit developer.usatoday.com.

Here’s how it works. The Foundation Center provides a real-time stream of grants published by participating funders. When a funder decides to publish one or more of its grants through Grantsfire, that grant or those grants are immediately included in the Grantsfire RSS feed. We take the data from that feed, and store it (grants past and present), and make it available as a web service within GivingData.

This new feature allows GivingData users to see what other foundations are funding their grantees. And as more funders participate in Grantsfire, the more valuable it will become as a resource to all funders.

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As of this date, the following grantmaking organizations are participating in the Grantsfire initiative:

• The Energy Foundation
• The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
• W.K. Kellogg Foundation
• Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
• The Rockefeller Foundation

More information about Grantsfire is available at the Foundation Center website.

Here’s how it works. For every grantee in your database with a United States address, you can see a summary of that location’s demographic/population, geographic, and housing data. This data includes ethnic percentages, population density, housing vacancy, and land size, as well as the population change from the previous (2000) U.S. Census. This information is right at your fingertips—available on the grantee summary page alongside all of the other data about the grantee from your grants management system. The data is generously provided courtesy of USA Today (more information at developer.usatoday.com).

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To learn more about GivingData or to request a demo, contact us at 617.500.3399 or info@GivingData.com.

But how do we get that data from your grants management system into these maps? How is the raw address data in GIFTS made readable by a map? The answer is geocoding. Geocoding is the act of converting a street address into latitude and longitude coordinates which can then, in turn, be used to plot the address on a map. This is how we plot data on our Cluster Map. As a standard service within your GivingData installation, all of your organization’s grantee addresses are geocoded automatically. So beyond using those geocoded addresses in the GivingData maps, you can also use it for other purposes.

The other kind of geocoding activity built into GivingData is place name geocoding. This is the process of translating a street address into a named location, such as a country, state/province, city, neighborhood, etc. Instead of plotting an address by latitude and longitude, that is, a single point on a map, place name geocoding identifies that address within the boundaries of a larger geographic entity. For example, a street address in Boston would be identified as being in a state (Massachusetts), country (U.S.A.), county (Suffolk), neighborhood, zip code, census block, etc. All of this boundary data may be relevant for helping us understand social and demographic characteristics within and across geographic boundaries. An excellent example of the power of this type of data analysis can be seen in the New York Times’ Mapping the 2010 Census project.

Sample Image from New York Times Census Map – http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map

And while we’re very proud of the work we’ve done to date using maps, we know we’re just scratching the surface of what is possible. Mapping grantee addresses is one thing, but being able to map and view data by population served is the next frontier for those of us working in the social sector. There are already a number of projects out there that are using geographic data in some very innovative ways, but philanthropic organizations as a whole still have much work to do in terms of analyzing population data to improve funding effectiveness. Connecting grantmaking dollars and outcomes to the people and causes served will lead to entirely new ways of thinking about how our social investments are made.

We continue to work towards bringing richer geographic data tools to our clients. In an upcoming version (to be released later this month), we will be introducing data from the 2010 U.S. Census into GivingData. Each U.S. based grantee will be identified within its census tract, and population demographics will be available as part of that grantee’s profile. This will be included in each and every installation of GivingData.

In the field of philanthropy, there are so many opportunities to use mapping data visualizations to better inform our work. We will be working with other sector leaders to align our tools with the ever-evolving industry standards and continue to be a part of the conversation as grantmakers improve their data management and analysis capacity in this new discipline.

For more on how your organization can take advantage of geocoding and geospatial applications, please contact us at info@GivingData.com or 617.500.3399.

With this new option, an interactive slider is used to select a dollar size range of grants or payments. So, as the example below shows, if you would like to see grants between $1 million and $10 million, you would use the slider to select the range as seen below.

And after the range is selected, the resulting page would only show data for grant amounts between $1 million and $10 million.

This is a small enhancement, but just one more way that we continue to add flexibility and power to our grantmaking analytics platform. More to come.

Region Map

With GivingData Version 2.2 comes our newest map visualization, the Region Map. Using Google’s map technology, grantmaking totals by region are available, including a world view that displays dollar totals for each country, as well as individual country views showing totals for each subdivision/region within each country.

World Map

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Country Map (U.S.)

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The Region Map visualization is fully interactive, with a simple mouseover of a country to see total amounts (grants or payments made) in that country. Also, clicking on a country shows totals for the regions/subdivisions (ex., states in the U.S.) within that country.

And not only can grantmaking be viewed in various regions, but totals and regional allocations of grantmaking dollars can be viewed at the program level. The below example shows Climate Change funding activity across the United States, with aggregate totals for each state.

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And just as with the Cluster Map visualization, the Region Map utilizes GivingData’s revolutionary geocoding engine, enabling all of your grantee addresses to be automatically assigned a latitude and longitude.

Under the Hood – System Enhancements

We just took a huge step forward towards making GivingData not just a grantmaking analytics and business intelligence tool for working with GIFTS data, but to becoming a data management tool in its own right, allowing organizations to supplement their GIFTS data with data stored and managed in GivingData. You can see examples of this capability in the geocoding of grantee addresses and the integration of this geographic data in our map visualizations. In the future we will be adding the ability to track evaluation and outcome data to provide the full view of the grantmaking cycle. Stay tuned!

Last year we added our first map-based visualization, the Cluster Map, to GivingData. At the time, we promised more maps, and now we’re happy to announce the Regional Map. The Regional Map will show grant and payment amounts in aggregate by country as well as by subdivision within countries (ex., states within the United States, provinces within Canada, etc.). Below is a screenshot of what these maps will look like.

World Map

U.S. Map (Sample Country)

Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement about Version 2.2 soon!

In the future we’ll be adding more personalization features as well as more functionality around role management and levels of access.

For current clients, to inquire about deploying this new feature, contact us at info@givingdata.com or 617.500.3399.