Getting Started with IATI
2. Decide which activities to publish
The first step in building an IATI publication is to determine the kinds of activities your publication should contain.
As the reporting organisation, you decide how to group your work into activities, and you can define what an activity is for your organisation. This means you can structure your IATI data in a way that best reflects your work, noting:
- each activity should be a piece of development or humanitarian work you are doing
- you
can use how you break down your work internally to define your activities, for
example, an activity might be:
- a large programme at country or region level
- a smaller project in a local area
- the work relating to a particular grant or contract
- each activity can be a different size and scope
- for each activity you should report location, sector and financial information.
Choosing IATI activity identifiers
Each IATI activity should be uniquely defined by its iati-identifier: a unique number constructed using your own organisation identifier and the internal activity identifier.
Organisations can define their own activity identifiers – there is no need to copy a donors iati-identifier as part of your own identifier. Usually the best solution is to use the activity numbers as they are known in your own project or financial administration.
More information on how to structure your activities, and on giving them activity identifiers, is in our article ‘What is an activity?’