Do you record grants that were awarded but then returned

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1

Hi

I just wondered how many Trusts/Foundations and Gov Funders are publishing data on grants that were awarded but then may have been returned in full at a later stage because of complications/project delivery issues.

Many thanks &
Best Wishes
Fiona

2

Hi, just to add what we do on this - our award values for many of the projects we fund each year change on an almost daily basis, either through unspent and returned funds, money we may claim back through ineligible spend or simply projects that never got off the ground, therefore causing us to de-commit any unpaid commitment.

At any given point we can use our Grants Management System to tell us the latest in terms of awards data, however to provide this publicly each day would not be possible given how resource intensive this would be.
We have a statutory requirement to publish our awards on a quarterly basis (as a Lottery distributor, this is for the DCMS) at the moment, which now encompasses providing an update on our awards for 360Giving and GrantNav. During this quarterly data-cleanse, we collate all new awards data and go back and update all of our existing records that may have now changed. A consequence of this may result in a zero-value being attached to an award, but we do try and remove them to keep the data looking clean and our awards reflective of a true financial (and accurate) commitment.

When responding to request for data, unless explicitly requested, we tend to caveat the response with the period of time a sheet of awards is for. So for example, the latest award cleanse covers us up until 31st December 2017. A collation and cleanse of quarterly data is not an easy task and takes us typically three weeks to do, but we feel doing this on a quarterly basis is sufficient in providing the most up to date info that we possibly can!

3

Thanks Neil

This is really helpful and I’d be really keen to see if other large funders are doing this - I would assume all major publicly funded funders will but perhaps the private foundations may not be.

I think it is also helpful to see where an organisation has received a £0 grant award (due to a project not getting off the ground etc) but I’m not sure 360Giving is set up to capture this.

I will share this with our local funders to see if we can all agree a similar approach.

All the best
Fiona