Ways of visualising IATI data

The tool d-portal.org provides a view of all data published to IATI. This section explains how you can use d-portal for visualising your organisation’s data and making sure there are no data quality issues.

Once you’ve successfully published to IATI, your data can be accessed by anyone through d-portal. This allows you to visually check your data, search for the activities published to IATI by your organisation and find areas for improvement.

How d-portal works

D-portal stands for ‘development portal’. It provides a visualisation of the data published to the IATI standard. You can easily search for development and humanitarian activities by adding multiple filters, such as activities published by a particular organisation which are happening in a particular country. You can also add in a free text search, for example the activities must contain the word ‘diabetes’.

D-portal updates each week, collecting data from new IATI publishers. It also does a smaller update each evening, which collects any changes made to existing publishers’ data. For more information on how d-portal works, see the FAQs.

How to check your data using d-portal

To check your data on d-portal, select your organisation in the drop-down list of ‘publishers’. You will then see the overview page for your organisation, this includes:

• Active, ended and total number of projects
  This section presents all your published IATI activities and splits them into Active, Ended and Total number of projects by using the activity status. Click any of these to see a list of your activities. Then go into any activity to check it presents your activity information correctly.

• Funding went to
  This section shows the recipient countries your organisation provided funding for. The ‘IATI spend’ columns contain total disbursements and expenditure reported to IATI for the current and previous 2 years. If data is not showing in these columns, please check whether you have added recipient countries for your activities and whether you’re publishing disbursement and expenditure transactions. The ‘IATI budget (allocated)’ shows the total activity-level budgets for this year reported to IATI by your organisation, while the ‘IATI Budget (total) refers to the total organisational budget. You can also compare this with data reported by your organisation (if any) to the Creditor Reporting System (CRS).

• Where does the money go
  This section shows your organisation’s ‘IATI spend’ and ‘IATI budget’ (like in ‘Funding went to’), but this time d-portal splits it by the sectors your organisation is working in. If you can’t see data in this section, please check whether you have entered sector codes for each activity and note that d-portal only lists OECD DAC 3-digit sectors. If you have used any other sector classification, they won’t show on d-portal.

• Heatmap of all activities
  This section displays a heatmap of all your activities with precise locations. Locations are longitude and latitude data. Please check that the map correctly reflects the locations you’ve added. If you can’t see a heatmap, it means you haven’t yet provided locations in your data.

If you can’t access your data in any of the above sections, or your data is displaying incorrectly, it’s likely there are issues with your data quality. As a first step, please refer to common reasons for data not showing on d-portal. If you still can’t find an answer, please check for data quality errors using the IATI Dashboard.

Other visualisation tools

IATI data is open source which means once you’ve published to IATI, your data can be easily visualised in a user-friendly way.

D-portal also has an option for visualising your data and linking it to your own website. If you’re interested in doing so, please refer to the d-portal Generator.

Read this case study for an example of how Oxfam Novib have used IATI data in their own visualisation portal.

Please also refer to Tools and resources for data use for other ways to visualise your data.