Key activity information to publish

Publishing to IATI means describing with data the work your organisation does.

For this you break your work down into activities – these could be programmes, projects or any work you do. For each activity detail what the work is, where and when it happened or is happening, who is involved, how it is being financed and so on. Each piece of information about an activity is stored in an ‘element’.

Many further details can be added, for example geographic coordinates, results information, document links and policy markers.

We suggest you start by adding the details (in the form of elements) set out below. All elements are mandatory unless they say otherwise.

Identification

• IATI Identifier
• Reporting org

Basic activity information

• Title
• Description
• Activity status
• Activity date

Participating organisations

• Participating org

Geopolitical information

• Recipient country (recommended)
• or recipient region (recommended)

Classifications

• Sector

Financial

• Budgets (recommended)
• Transactions (recommended)

There are many more details you can add about your activities beyond these key elements. The more elements you use, the better the picture of your organisation’s work.

See the full table of elements that can be used to report in IATI.

Additional donor requirements

If you receive funding from the UK Department for International Development or the Dutch or Belgian governments you’ll have extra reporting requirements. For information on these see Donors' reporting requirements.

Building your own system?

The following requirements are built into most publishing systems. Make to sure to include them if building your own:

• Activity files must be well-formed XML
• Activity files must validate against the relevant version of the IATI activity schema, test this using the IATI Validator
• Including the @generated-datetime and @last-updated-datetime attributes are highly recommended