Creating IATI activity identifiers

Each of your activities must have an IATI identifier, which is a globally unique way of referring to your activity.

Create an identifier by choosing a 'string' (a series of letters or numbers) to add to the end of your IATI organisation identifier. You will have entered your organisation identifier when registering with IATI.

Once you have published an activity, its IATI identifier must not change.

Example

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has IATI organisation identifier: XM-DAC-4114

They form their activity identifiers by adding whether an activity is an output or a project, plus the relevant internal code. For example:

1. Accelerator Lab - Ghana XM-DAC-41114-PROJECT-00120467
2. Ghana Integrated SDG Platform XM-DAC-41114-OUTPUT-00115803

You are free to choose your activity identifiers, as long as they begin with your organisation identifier and are each unique.

Rules and guidance

It is important to correctly form your IATI identifiers as other IATI publishers may use them to link their own activities to yours.

To allow these connections to take place, make sure that your identifiers:

• are unique across all of your activities (even if they are in separate files)
• do not include whitespace at the start or end
• only use numbers, letters and dashes
• do not change once you have published the activity

In rare cases, you may need to change your IATI organisation identifier. When this happens you should record your previous organisation identifier in your activities using the <other-identifier> element. Activity identifiers of published activities should not change in this scenario.

See How to update your organisation details for more information.