Building better data about grants supporting climate action

 
Data Orchard worked with Power to Change
 
 

Client: Power to Change
Date: 2021
Work: Research and data analysis, mapping

Power to Change is a charity with a mission to strengthen community businesses to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges at a local level, including climate change. In spring 2021, they asked Data Orchard to support them with analysis of the grants awarded to community businesses linked to climate and ecological action. We worked with our partner, Future Energy Associates who specialise in energy and data science, to:

  • conduct a data and literature review e.g. research by David Kane and Charlotte Ravenscroft, identifying environmental funders;

  • compare the Power to Change grants data with other funder data using 360 Degree Giving's Grantnav tool;

  • define a new taxonomy for project categorisation and tagging of their climate action grants;

  • apply these newly defined tags to create, analyse, and evaluate a full climate action data set of their grants data;

  • recommend improvements in the way grant data is recorded in their system, to make it easier to extract the information needed in future.

At the end of the project we delivered a briefing report with analysis and visualisations of the key themes and trends on climate related grant making. The Python code for the analysis was also published on Github for openness and for others to make use of.

Power to Change told us they chose to work with Data Orchard because of our knowledge of the subject, the service we offered and our skills and qualifications. The fact that we are a social enterprise was also very important to them. They used our work to inform future planning and strategy around new grant making and support interventions for climate and ecological action and will use it to communicate the impact of these in the future.

 
 
 
 
Case studyData OrchardAll work, Research and analysis, Mapping, Climate and environment