Publish your diversity data

This guidance will help organisations ensure their diversity data is:

• published in the agreed format and contains the required data
• kept up to date
• easily found online

Collect or extract data about workforce diversity. You may already have an existing dataset that you could start from, but this may need to be reshaped to match the schema we jointly defined - largely based on existing ONS categories. You don't need to have data in every category - just include as much as you can or feel comfortable with as an organisation.

If you don't have data in a category, consider if it would be appropriate for you to start collecting it and how. For example, most organisations don't currently collect information on socio-economic background and we recommend following the Social Mobility Commission's toolkit which was developed with input from a range of organisations.

Make sure you have your summary information as counts of staff rather than percentages.

To complete step 2 you will need the summary information for your organisation's diversity figures as counts of staff rather than percentages.

Once you have the data you will need to create a CSV file. You can either use spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or Apple Numbers and save as a CSV file or you can use our diversity data builder tool to help you create a CSV file. Our builder tool will lead you through the process. Simply fill in the values that you can and then save the resulting table to your computer. The builder tool will also let you load existing diversity data CSV files and modify rows.

Warning: if you choose to create or amend your data using Microsoft Excel then make sure to set the format for the published column to ISO8601 (e.g. 'YYYY-MM-DD') otherwise there is a good chance that it will be saved in Excel's internal date format or your system default instead. When you have finished editing and need to save, select ‘save as .csv file’. Once you have saved it is worth loading it into our Builder tool to check for errors. If you are struggling to get Excel to save dates as YYYY-MM-DD try putting the file through our CSVCleaner. Find out more about creating a CSV file.

The CSV file must include:

• a header row which must be the first row in the spreadsheet, with column headings exactly matching those in the specification (headers are case sensitive with no spacing)
• 1 row for each entry - an entry is a set of values for a specific date and organisation name/grouping/level

The file does not need to contain all the possible columns of data - only include the columns you have. We have deliberately made most values optional as we appreciate that different organisations will find some data easier to collate than others.

What if I don't have X?

Perhaps you don't have any data in an entire section. That's OK. Don't include those columns.

What if I don't have detailed ethnicity breakdowns?

If you don't have the detailed ethnicity breakdowns (e.g. "Bangladeshi", "English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British" etc) you don't need to include them. This is only provided to allow

To complete step 3 you must be able to add a file to a publicly accessible website.

You can publish the file to your own website if you wish. You may need to contact whoever updates your organisation's website to ask them how to do this. You will need to make sure that the URL (web address) of the CSV file is a persistent URL (a web address that will not change over time). For example, Open Innovations might use the following persistent URL (this is an example, not live data):

https://open-innovations.org/projects/diversity/data/latest.csv

If you don't have easy access to publishing files on your own website, you can publish the file to Data Mill North - a data portal for the north of England maintained by Leeds City Council. Firstly you will need to make sure your organisation is a publisher on Data Mill North. If it isn't you can contact us to see about setting up your organisation. If your organisation is already a publisher but you don't have any login details you can also contact us to set up a login account. If you are set up as a publisher and have login details you are ready to publish. Once you are logged in there will be a user menu at the top right. In this menu select "Create a Dataset". This will present a form to create an entry for your data. Once you have filled in the metadata you can click "Create Dataset". You will then be able to add your CSV file to the dataset.

Whether you publish on your own website or to Data Mill North, if you update the file the URL should not change. However, if it ever does change, you must tell us.

To make your data reuseable you should make sure you publish your data under an Open licence. If you are publishing to Data Mill North make sure to select an open licence such as ODbL or Creative Commons Attribution in the dataset metadata. This will allow us to include the data in the interactive dashboard and allow others to create other visualisations.

Open Innovations maintain the Leeds City Region register of diversity data that points to the data that you and other organisations publish. This register is used to power the Leeds City Region diversity dashboard.

The first time you create and publish your CSV file you must tell us where this is published (the persistent URL created in step 2). You must also tell us if this URL ever changes.

You can either email the persistent URL for the CSV file to diversity-data@open-innovations.org and we will add it to the register for you or you can edit the register on Github and create a pull request.