How to improve your data quality

Using the IATI Dashboard to improve your data quality

This guide introduces you to the IATI Dashboard. It shows how you can check if your files are valid, that your data is structured correctly and what further data you can add.

1. Ensure that your files are valid.
2. Go through the headlines on your individual publisher page on the IATI Dashboard to ensure that your data is structured properly.
3. Look at the Core page on the Dashboard’s Summary Statistics and work on getting all of your elements up to 100%.

Now you can choose an area of your data to work on. This could include increasing the frequency and decreasing the time-lag of your publishing, adding in forward-looking budgets, and increasing the number of elements you publish under the Financials and Value-added pages on the IATI Dashboard.

If you have any questions about the Dashboard and how to improve your data quality, please get in touch with the IATI Secretariat.

Check for errors on your individual publisher page

As a publisher, you can use your individual publisher page on the IATI Dashboard to check for validation errors. To find your page, go to the Dashboard’s homepage and select your organisation.

Starting with the Headlines box, check the following.

Does your Reporting Org match between the Registry and in your data?

If these don’t match, there’s a risk that your data won’t be imported into visualisation tools as it is invalid. You’ll need to update your Reporting Org in your IATI files to match your Reporting Org on the IATI Registry. Please follow steps 3 and 4 under ‘Changing your organisation’s IATI Org ID’ on the Updating your organisation details page.

Do you have at least one activity file and only one organisation file?

If you don’t have an activity file, please see what activity information you need to include. You should have only one organisation file; if you have none or more than one, please see What goes in your organisation file.

Do your number of activities and unique activities match?

In IATI, every activity needs a unique identifier – see What data should I publish? for instructions. If multiple activities have the same identifier, they won’t be correctly pulled through into visualisation tools. Check your data to find out which identifiers are duplicated.

Do you have only one organisation?

Unless you are publishing on behalf of another organisation, only report Organisation information for your own organisation in your organisation file. If you’ve added the details of any other company, remove these.

Are you using a valid version?

The IATI Standard has been updated in stages. Each stage has a corresponding version number. Valid versions are: 1.01, 1.02 1.03, 1.04, 1.05 and 2.01, 2.02 and 2.03. If any other version number is shown, please correct this in your files.

If you are using hierarchies, are these sequential?

Hierarchies allow you to demonstrate your internal decision-making and flow of funds in your organisation. You should start with activities at level 1, and then progress to levels 2, 3, and so on.

Do you have a licence showing?

IATI data must be published under an open data licence. You specify your type of licence on the IATI Registry. Please see How to license your data.

Do you have zero files failing validation?

To check which of your files are failing validation, go to the ‘Data Quality’ section on your Dashboard page. Each invalid file is listed with a link to the ‘IATI public validator’. Select ‘test validation’ to get details of the errors in your file. Clicking ‘Extra info’ will provide additional information about the errors, including on which line they occur. Please note that the IATI public validator checks only the structure of your files and does not give information on content errors.

Please note that later in 2020 IATI will be launching a new version of the IATI Validator.