Methodology · v0 · development preview
Pledged ≠ paid.
A pledge, a transfer into a donor-controlled foundation, and a grant that actually reached an independent recipient are three different things. They are tracked as separate lifecycle states and never summed into one "giving" figure.
Capital lifecycle states
| Capital event | Counted as deployed? | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Public pledge (incl. Giving Pledge signature) | No | Displayed as a commitment |
| Transfer into donor's own foundation or DAF | No | Capital staged, still controlled |
| Grant approved for future payment (990-PF) | No | Latest-year balance shown as awaiting — balances are never summed across years |
| Grant paid to an independent recipient (990-PF), or donor-published paid gift | Yes | Deployed — statutory and donor-reported totals kept separate |
| Gift with amount withheld at recipient request | Counted, amount excluded | Never recorded as $0 |
Current sources · as of 2026-07-30
- Tier A IRS Form 990-PF Part XV (public domain) — grants paid during year vs approved for future payment, per filing, discovered via the IRS yearly e-file index and retrieved from the GivingTuesday data lake mirror. Amended filings deduplicated.
- Donor-published Gates Foundation committed-grants database — lifetime award commitments. Commitments are not payments.
- Donor-published Yield Giving — paid gifts; withheld amounts counted but excluded from totals.
- Tier A CCEW annual return Part B (OGL v3) — UK statutory "grants to institutions" totals per financial year, from the Charity Commission's daily full-register extract. Accrual-basis aggregates, kept distinct from grant line items; GBP converted at the IRS yearly-average rate, stored on every figure.
- CC0 Wikidata — person identity, citizenship (flags), founder-linked vehicles, and dated net-worth estimates (P2218). Enrichment only: identifier claims are confirmed against the IRS Business Master File before display.
Giving rate divides deployed capital in the trailing five fiscal years by the dated Wikidata net-worth estimate shown beside it — these estimates are often years stale, which is why the as-of date accompanies every figure. Pts is purely presentational: five-year deployed capital indexed to the board leader at 100. Neither is a judgement of character, effectiveness, or generosity.
Transparency score · volunteered vs compelled
A US private foundation must name every material grantee on Form 990-PF. An England & Wales charitable trust need name nobody at all while the settlor lives (Charities Act 2011 s.132(4)). Scoring "do we know the recipients?" would therefore rank donors by the jurisdiction they file in rather than by anything they chose.
So the score is split. 70 points are volunteered — publishing an open grants database, and capital traceable to a named recipient. 30 are compelled— how completely and how currently statutory filings land. Both are shown separately on every profile, with the jurisdiction's disclosure rules stated, so a high compelled score reads as law-abiding rather than generous, and a low one is never mistaken for secrecy the donor chose. Below three loaded events no score is shown at all.
Geography · a correction most datasets miss
IRS filings do not use ISO 3166 country codes. They use the IRS's own published list, which belongs to the FIPS family: SZ is Switzerland (ISO: Eswatini), SF is South Africa (ISO: Finland),NI is Nigeria (ISO: Nicaragua). Only 94 of 259 codes match their ISO equivalent, and 75 of the rest are valid ISO codes for a different country — so the failure is silent.
Read as ISO, this corpus would relocate $5.02bn to the wrong country — $3.18bn of Swiss grants alone would land in Eswatini — and drop a further $2.29bn as unmatched. Every code here is resolved through the IRS table (pipeline/reference/irs_country_codes.csv, sourced from irs.gov). US and foreign recipients are separated by the filing's own address element, never by guessing from a value: eleven two-letter codes are simultaneously a US state and a foreign province — LA is Lagos on a foreign address and Louisiana on a US one. Codes that name no place, such asOC "Other Country", are counted but never plotted.
What absence means
"No capital-event records loaded" is a statement about this pipeline's coverage, never about a person's giving. US law does not require public disclosure of most charitable donors; donor-advised funds are structurally opaque; private and anonymous giving exists. Profiles state the verification scope and its date.
Reproducibility & corrections
Every figure traces to an immutable, content-hashed snapshot of its source document, and the pipeline that produces these pages is open source. Corrections are made by adding evidence, never by silently editing records. A formal right-of-reply and corrections process ships before any public launch.