Consistent organisation identifiers form an important part of the 360Giving standard. They facilitate one of the goals of 360Giving - being able to compare and merge datasets from different publishers.
While use of external identifiers for organisations is encouraged by the 360Giving standard and recommended and supported by the 360Giving team, not all publishers are able to use them in their data. This paper examines the extent to which publishers are using external identifiers and reports on a process of trying to fill in the gaps.
To find duplicate organisations within the dataset of grants, tools from dedupe.io were used. This involved both using the online tool and the open source python library. All grants were run through the process, with existing external identifiers included.