360Giving launches data visualisation challenge
Melanie May | 1 May 2018 | News
360Giving has launched a competition offering individual cash prizes of up to £6,000 for new, creative uses of its dataset, which provides information on over 280,000 grants worth £24 billion, made to more than 170,000 recipients from funders including the Big Lottery Fund, Comic Relief and the Wellcome Trust.
The global ‘Digging the Data’ Visualisation Challenge is inviting anyone with an interest in design, analytics or data journalism to submit their original data visualisations using 360Giving’s grant data. A total prize fund of £20,000 is available for qualifying entries.
The Challenge has been launched to coincide with World Design Day and asks participants to address two questions selected from suggestions crowdsourced from 360Giving’s user community:
- Thematic trends: Who has funded what over the years?
- User-led organisations: Who funds them, in what thematic area, how much funding do they receive and what are their organisational structures?
Entries will be judged by a panel of experts led by co-founder Will Perrin, 360Giving. The panel will consider how well applicants answer the two questions, how innovative their visualisations are, and their ability to incorporate aesthetics and creativity.
Prizes of between £2,000 and £6,000 will be awarded to the top three entries. There will also be public vote to choose the recipient of the ‘people’s choice’ award, and further cash prizes are on offer for eye-catching entries that don’t make the judges’ top three.
Submissions must be made to the dedicated Challenge website by 15 July. Winners will be announced by mid September 2018.
360Giving Co-founder Fran Perrin said:
“Visualisations can be beautiful to look at but that’s far from their main source of value. The full potential of any dataset can only be unlocked when the data is put into meaningful context. That’s the goal of this Challenge. By opening up our wealth of grantmaking data to some of the world’s most inquisitive and creative minds, we hope that they will help funders to maximise their impact on the many great charitable causes they support.”
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.