De-identify grant recipients for privacy

Updated 21 January 2026 04:35

George Chapman

Most organisations that have received grant funding from NSW Government have their grant recipient information published on nsw.gov.au.

However, where individual citizens can be identified, it is important to uphold their privacy.

In these cases, you need to de-identify that individual’s grant recipient information.

When grant recipient details are kept private

You will need to ensure that published information about grant recipients cannot be used in combination with other details to identify an individual. For example, in a location with a small population, a single recipient may be able to be identified based on their name, their location and the amount of funding received.

There are two factors you need to consider:

meeting the requirement to act in the public interest through transparency around government decisions about the use and expenditure of public money outlined in the Grants Administration Guide (the Guide).
protecting individuals’ Personally Identifiable Information (PII). The Guide gives some clear examples of when this is the case, with reference to the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act (PPIP Act).

Meeting transparency requirements set out in the Guide

Using our automated process to de-identify your grant recipients, you are able to publish the following overarching information about grants awarded as required by the Guide to meet transparency requirements, while still preserving PII as private for individual grant recipients:

the name of the grant or a description of the grant
the number of grant recipients
the total value of the grant opportunity
the decision-maker
a privacy statement about why the recipients have been de-identified.

Note: if your team has been onboarded to OneGMS (SmartyGrants), you must build, edit and publish your recipients (grantees) in SmartyGrants. They will appear on the finder within 30 minutes.
Recipients can be de-identified in SmartyGrants.
Email the team: onegms@dpird.nsw.gov.au

Steps to de-identify recipient records before upload

Download the grant recipients’ spreadsheet.
When preparing your data for the spreadsheet, you will need to de-identify the grant recipient’s names, row by row, before you send it through. We suggest that you follow your agency recommendations on how to de-identify your grant recipients’ names.
Check that no other fields in the record contains any additional PII (for example, in the project name or description fields).
When you send your spreadsheet for upload, make sure that it is clear to our Content team that your data has been de-identified by adding a note to the request form.

This Fact Sheet - De-identification of personal information from the NSW IPC has detailed suggestions on how agencies can de-identify their data.

Note: you do not have to provide additional information in the spreadsheet or do any data aggregation. The automated process will do that for you.

Select the de-identify option in your grant

For grants where all the recipients’ data must be de-identified for privacy reasons, you will need to go to the grant editing screen to check the following box, under the field title:

Privacy requirements for this grant

The checked box confirms you understand that you will be de-identifying the grant recipient details and project details from the website. It will also change how the grant recipients will look on the published page via automated aggregation tools.

Note: agencies using SmartyGrants (OneGMS) will select the yes option in the field: Exemption to publish grantee details. This will select the de-identified recipient block on the grant page.

You can contact the OneGMS team for the user guide or more information: onegms@dpird.nsw.gov.au

How de-identified recipients display on the page

When you tick the de-identify check box in your grant and then save and publish, it will display only an aggregated view.

Any recipient added to that grant will have its data collated into a general view.

1. On the grant page, there will be an overview block.

This overview will be based on the period during which grants were awarded (single or multiple occasions) and will show a summary of the following data:

How many people received funding from this grant
The total amount of funds that have been dispersed to individuals.

2. In addition, on the grant recipients' listing page, it will show (see below, in mobile view):

The number of locations that have benefited from this grant.

3. The automated process will then collate data into a table underneath this overview, showing grant distribution for each month the grant is open, with the following information listed:

Date – formatted as month year
Grant recipients – shown as the total number for that month
Distributed across - the number of local government areas funds were distributed across
Amount – the total for that month.

When any month is opened to show more details, it will show:

who approved the grant - the decision maker
the agency or agencies funding this grant (from the grant details page)
the program term
a list of all the LGAs or suburbs where recipients were located - aggregated from the data
- (the LGA or suburb is only shown if more than 6 recipients within the month are from that specific location)
a privacy statement about why grant recipient names have been removed with a link to more information about privacy.

Examples of de-identified recipients added to grants:

What happens to the data you provide for upload

Once the upload has been successfully completed, we will remove the final compiled and cleaned CSV files from our folders where they are temporarily stored for the purposes of upload.

In this way we ensure that any data that has a privacy impact is not retained beyond the time necessary for processing.

Note: we will not accept any spreadsheets for import where there is a clear privacy requirement if the names or other PII data are still present.

We require you to de-identify recipient names row by row and check for any other potential PII information remaining in other fields of the spreadsheet (such as in the Project description) before you send it in.

Any spreadsheets shared with our team that contain individual names will be redacted in our ticketing queue.

Head to the Grants page for more articles on editing your grants, or adding recipients so they appear on the funding finder.