Share your grants data

Required

• Recipient Name
• Recipient Street Address
• Recipient City
• Recipient State/Province
• Recipient Country
• Grant Currency (if not USD)
• Grant Amount
• Amount Type (Paid or Authorized/Approved)
• Fiscal Year
• Grant Description

Highly Recommended

• Transaction ID
• Recipient EIN / International ID
• Grant Title
• Geographic Area Served
• Grant Program Area
• Grant Subject(s)
• Grant Population(s) Served
• Grant Support Strategies
• Transaction Type
• Grant Duration (or Grant Start/End Dates)

When reporting Authorized amounts, please report the full amounts of grants, including those to be paid out over multiple years. Also include Grant Duration (in months) or Grant Start Date and Grant End Date, if possible.

Providing a detailed grant description is one of the best ways to ensure that your data will be accurately coded to capture the subject, population, geographic area served and support strategy you intended and, ultimately, mapped correctly.

In general, a good grant description includes the following information:

• WHAT: What is the primary objective of the grant?
• HOW: How will the objectives of the grant be achieved?
• WHO: Which group or groups are meant to benefit from the grant?
• WHERE: What geographic location(s) is the grant meant to serve?

Use the fiscal sponsor’s name and location in the required fields, as well as their EIN and URL. Add the recipient project’s name (and URL if available) to the grant title or grant description fields. The “Complete” version of our template also includes a column to note the name of the fiscally sponsored project, however, this field does not display publicly.

To facilitate the use of this information, Candid codes grants data with subject, population, support strategy, transaction type, and geographic area served codes. To learn more about our Philanthropy Classification System please visit taxonomy.candid.org.

Data we collect are coded in an automated process with review by data experts. If you would like to have more direct control over how your data is coded, please include the appropriate codes in the data you submit to us.

If you’d like to know more about our coding process, please refer to our Grants data fact sheet or contact us at egrants@candid.org.

We encourage organizations to submit their grants data quarterly, but you should aim for at least once a year.

Email egrants@candid.org with any updates needed for your data. Please include your grant IDs.

The data you share with Candid is published to our products, which allows users to get a holistic view of the sector.

Candid is committed to being a responsible steward of the data that is shared with us. We recognize that in some cases it may not be possible to share full details about your grants, and that circumstances can change, making grants data that were once safe to share more sensitive. This FAQ provides guidance for how to share your data with Candid and what to do if your organization finds itself in the latter situation.

When sharing your data, please keep the following things in mind:

• Any grants or individual grant details that should not be made public should not be shared with us. It should be assumed that any data sent to us will be published in Candid platforms. If the work covered by the grant is of a sensitive nature, please refer to the first question below, “What are my options for sharing sensitive data?”
• Email is not a secure means of transferring sensitive data. Please do not include such data in what you share with Candid or our partners, even if it comes with instructions to anonymize or exclude certain details. Sensitive data should be anonymized, aggregated, or removed by your organization before it is shared externally.
• The degree to which you anonymize or exclude data should reflect the degree or nature of the risks associated with sharing that data. For example, if there is a high likelihood that the safety or lives of a grantee’s staff could be put at risk were details of the grant to be made public, your organization may opt to anonymize several aspects of that grant, or if necessary, exclude it entirely from what is shared with Candid.

Recipient name field

• List recipients as ‘Anonymous Recipient’ or ‘Anonymous Individual(s)’

Recipient location field

• If anonymizing the recipient alone is not enough, information about the recipient’s location can be excluded to different degrees:
  • Exclude street address
  • Exclude street address and city
  • Exclude street address, city, and state
  • Exclude street address, city, state, and country (in this case location would be a region)

Grant text field

• Grant text can also be excluded to different degrees. Depending on the degree and nature of the risk, the following fields can be excluded:
  • Program area(s)
  • Grant title
  • Grant description

Grantmaker name field

• If there are potential risks to the grantmaker as well, the grantmaker name can be anonymized in Candid’s records. The grantmaker name would appear as “Anonymous Funder”

If these anonymization or exclusion options are not enough, funders can also submit their data to Candid as an aggregate. For instance, you can provide us with a total amount funded to a particular geographical region for a specific issue area, such as abuse prevention, and we’ll process the data as one grant to an anonymized recipient in that region, coded for abuse prevention as the subject and for that total grant amount.

In rare cases, such as those where security risks arise, it may be necessary for Candid to delete or modify a grant or set of grants from our database and products.

If deleted, the grants information will no longer be available in Candid databases, products, and platforms. In these cases, we will not be able to re-add the grants data if the security risk no longer poses a threat.

A less permanent solution to address security concerns involves anonymizing grants data.

To request that grants be anonymized or removed from Candid databases, please email egrants@candid.org.

If anonymization is requested, we may suppress grants temporarily in our products (while we work to modify the data to reflect the chosen level of anonymity). It will take up to two weeks before these modifications are reflected in products.

If deletion is requested, data will be suppressed in all our products within one to two weeks and deleted completely from our databases within one month.

For more information on this topic, please see Sharing Data Responsibly: A Conversation Guide for Funders.

If you have any additional questions, please contact Candid at egrants@candid.org.