Publishing Statistics

Every organisation publishing IATI data appears in the Publishing statistics tables.

These tables give an overview of the data different organisations are publishing and how timely and comprehensive it is. They also provide an overview of what you can expect to find in an organisation’s data. The tables are useful for answering questions such as ‘What else could I add to my publishing to make it more useful for data users?’ Most tables look only at live activities, so historic information is not included.

Above each table is an explanation of what’s included. Below each table is more detail on the methodology for each calculation.

In IATI you should be publishing data that is timely, forward-looking and comprehensive.

Timely

• Frequency: Update your data at least quarterly. The Dashboard checks to see when you added a more recent transaction date. This counts as an ‘update’. If you’ve updated your data, this will show in the relevant month. Please note: if you’ve included future transaction dates at any point, this will skew the figures. Transaction dates should never be in the future.
• Time lag: You can also check how up-to-date your data is, relative to the first time you published it. You should aim to reduce the time lag in your publication.

Forward-looking

• Here you can see how many of your activities contain forward-looking budgets. Ideally, 100% of your activities should have a budget for each year in which the activity is set to take place.
• The table shows activities taking place, now and over the next two years, and the number of activities with budget for that year. Your data quality will improve as you include more forward-looking budgets.

Comprehensive

These tables analyse which ‘elements’ you’re publishing for each activity, and therefore detail the work you’re doing. The summary table gives an overview of your data.

• Core covers the basic activity data, largely that covered in Key activity information to publish. When looking at your data quality you first want to get your ‘core’ score as close to 100 as possible. This means that, for 100% of your activities, you are reporting the ‘core’ elements.
• Financials covers your transactions and how well your data can be traced down and up to other organisations.
• Value added contains additional elements particularly helpful for data users, such as sectors, location and results.

Under comprehensiveness, you may notice a number followed by one in brackets, e.g. 90 (100). The first number is the percentage of your activities that have the element reported correctly. The number in brackets shows those with the element reported but with an error in some of them. You can use the methodology at the end of the table to try and work out what is going wrong in your data.

Coverage and summary statistics

Coverage

• Coverage statistics are designed to assess what proportion of an organisation’s total operational spend is published to IATI. This calculation has temporarily been removed from IATI Publishing Stats while we review the methodology.
• In future, we plan to use an automated system that will calculate the coverage statistic for an organisation by using its IATI organisation file. We are exploring a methodology that uses the <total-expenditure> element in a publisher’s organisation file, and compares this to the total spend for a given year in their activity files. In the meantime, we strongly recommend that all IATI publishers include <total-expenditure> in their organisation file.

Summary statistics

This section provides an overview and compares all IATI publishers by currently scoring the three dimensions – timeliness, forward-looking and comprehensiveness. The score will be adjusted by the proportion of a publisher’s activities covered in their IATI data when the coverage calculation is re-introduced.

Humanitarian reporting

In the Publishing Statistics section, there’s also a table on humanitarian data published to IATI. If you’re doing humanitarian work, you can report this in your IATI data, and it’ll appear on the Humanitarian Dashboard page. This table picks up only activities flagged as ‘humanitarian’, either by including a humanitarian DAC 5-digit sector code between 72010 and 74010 inclusive, or a humanitarian attribute.

You can see whether publishers are using additional humanitarian elements in their data, whether an activity is related to an emergency or an appeal, and whether activities are linked to specific humanitarian clusters.

See this help page for how to report your humanitarian activities in IATI.