This is an online portal with information on donations that were announced publicly (or have been shared with permission) that were of interest to Vipul Naik. The git repository with the code for this portal, as well as all the underlying data, is available on GitHub. All payment amounts are in current United States dollars (USD). The repository of donations is being seeded with an initial collation by Issa Rice as well as continued contributions from him (see his commits and the contract work page listing all financially compensated contributions to the site) but all responsibility for errors and inaccuracies belongs to Vipul Naik. Current data is preliminary and has not been completely vetted and normalized; if sharing a link to this site or any page on this site, please include the caveat that the data is preliminary (if you want to share without including caveats, please check with Vipul Naik). We expect to have completed the first round of development by the end of July 2024. See the about page for more details. Also of interest: pageview data on analytics.vipulnaik.com, tutorial in README, request for feedback to EA Forum.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Affiliated organizations (current or former; restricted to potential donees or others relevant to donation decisions) | GiveWell Good Ventures |
| Best overview URL | https://causeprioritization.org/Open%20Philanthropy%20Project |
| Facebook username | openphilanthropy |
| Website | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/ |
| Donations URL | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants |
| Twitter username | open_phil |
| PredictionBook username | OpenPhilUnofficial |
| Page on philosophy informing donations | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/vision-and-values |
| Grant application process page | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers |
| Regularity with which donor updates donations data | continuous updates |
| Regularity with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update) | continuous updates |
| Lag with which donor updates donations data | months |
| Lag with which Donations List Website updates donations data (after donor update) | days |
| Data entry method on Donations List Website | Manual (no scripts used) |
| Org Watch page | https://orgwatch.issarice.com/?organization=Open+Philanthropy |
Brief history: Open Philanthropy (Open Phil for short) spun off from GiveWell, starting as GiveWell Labs in 2011, beginning to make strong progress in 2013, and formally separating from GiveWell as the "Open Philanthropy Project" in June 2017. In 2020, it started going by "Open Philanthropy" dropping the "Project" word.
Brief notes on broad donor philosophy and major focus areas: Open Philanthropy is focused on openness in two ways: open to ideas about cause selection, and open in explaining what they are doing. It has endorsed "hits-based giving" and is working on areas of AI risk, biosecurity and pandemic preparedness, and other global catastrophic risks, criminal justice reform (United States), animal welfare, and some other areas.
Notes on grant decision logistics: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/our-grantmaking-so-far-approach-and-process for the general grantmaking process and https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/questions-we-ask-ourselves-making-grant for more questions that grant investigators are encouraged to consider. Every grant has a grant investigator that we call the influencer here on Donations List Website; for focus areas that have Program Officers, the grant investigator is usually the Program Officer. The grant investigator has been included in grants published since around July 2017. Grants usually need approval from an executive; however, some grant investigators have leeway to make "discretionary grants" where the approval process is short-circuited; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/grants/discretionary-grants for more. Note that the term "discretionary grant" means something different for them compared to government agencies, see https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10213483361534364 for more.
Notes on grant publication logistics: Every publicly disclosed grant has a writeup published at the time of public disclosure, but the writeups vary significantly in length. Grant writeups are usually written by somebody other than the grant investigator, but approved by the grant investigator as well as the grantee. Grants have three dates associated with them: an internal grant decision date (that is not publicly revealed but is used in some statistics on total grant amounts decided by year), a grant date (which we call donation date; this is the date of the formal grant commitment, which is the published grant date), and a grant announcement date (which we call donation announcement date; the date the grant is announced to the mailing list and the grant page made publicly visible). Lags are a few months between decision and grant, and a few months between grant and announcement, due to time spent with grant writeup approval.
Notes on grant financing: See https://www.openphilanthropy.org/giving/guide-for-grant-seekers or https://www.openphilanthropy.org/about/who-we-are for more information. Grants generally come from the Open Philanthropy Fund, a donor-advised fund managed by the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, with most of its money coming from Good Ventures. Some grants are made directly by Good Ventures, and political grants may be made by the Open Philanthropy Action Fund. At least one grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/criminal-justice-reform/working-families-party-prosecutor-reforms-new-york was made by Cari Tuna personally. The majority of grants are financed by the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; however, the source of financing of a grant is not always explicitly specified, so it cannot be confidently assumed that a grant with no explicit listed financing is financed through the Open Philanthropy Project Fund; see the comment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Funding for multi-year grants is usually disbursed annually, and the amounts are often equal across years, but not always. The fact that a grant is multi-year, or the distribution of the grant amount across years, are not always explicitly stated on the grant page; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information. Some grants to universities are labeled "gifts" but this is a donee classification, based on different levels of bureaucratic overhead and funder control between grants and gifts; see https://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/october-2017-open-thread?page=2#comment-462 for more information.
Miscellaneous notes: Most GiveWell-recommended grants made by Good Ventures and listed in the Open Philanthropy database are not listed on Donations List Website as being under Open Philanthropy. Specifically, GiveWell Incubation Grants are not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=GiveWell+Incubation+Grants with donor GiveWell Incubation Grants), and grants made by Good Ventures to GiveWell top and standout charities are also not included (these are listed at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+top+and+standout+charities with donor Good Ventures/GiveWell top and standout charities). Grants to support GiveWell operations are not included here; they can be found at https://donations.vipulnaik.com/donor.php?donor=Good+Ventures%2FGiveWell+support with donor "Good Ventures/GiveWell support".The investment https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/farm-animal-welfare/impossible-foods in Impossible Foods is not included because it does not fit our criteria for a donation, and also because no amount was included. All other grants publicly disclosed by open philanthropy that are not GiveWell Incubation Grants or GiveWell top and standout charity grants should be included. Grants disclosed by grantees but not yet disclosed by Open Philanthropy are not included; some of them may be listed at https://issarice.com/open-philanthropy-project-non-grant-funding
Full donor page for donor Open Philanthropy
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Country | |
| Facebook page | centeronbudget |
| Website | http://www.cbpp.org/ |
| Twitter username | centeronbudget |
| Wikipedia page | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_on_Budget_and_Policy_Priorities |
| Instagram username | centeronbudget |
Full donee page for donee Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
| Item | Value |
|---|
| Cause area | Count | Median | Mean | Minimum | 10th percentile | 20th percentile | 30th percentile | 40th percentile | 50th percentile | 60th percentile | 70th percentile | 80th percentile | 90th percentile | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 4 | 250,000 | 277,500 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 250,000 | 250,000 | 250,000 | 335,000 | 335,000 | 425,000 | 425,000 | 425,000 |
| Macroeconomic stabilization policy | 4 | 250,000 | 277,500 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 100,000 | 250,000 | 250,000 | 250,000 | 335,000 | 335,000 | 425,000 | 425,000 | 425,000 |
If you hover over a cell for a given cause area and year, you will get a tooltip with the number of donees and the number of donations.
Note: Cause area classification used here may not match that used by donor for all cases.
| Cause area | Number of donations | Total | 2018 | 2016 | 2014 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Macroeconomic stabilization policy (filter this donor) | 4 | 1,110,000.00 | 350,000.00 | 425,000.00 | 335,000.00 |
| Total | 4 | 1,110,000.00 | 350,000.00 | 425,000.00 | 335,000.00 |
Graph of spending by cause area and year (incremental, not cumulative)
Graph of spending by cause area and year (cumulative)
| Title (URL linked) | Publication date | Author | Publisher | Affected donors | Affected donees | Affected influencers | Document scope | Cause area | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thoughts on the Sandler Foundation | 2015-02-24 | Holden Karnofsky | Open Philanthropy | Sandler Foundation Open Philanthropy | Center for American Progress ProPublica Center for Responsible Lending Washington Center for Equitable Growth Center on Budget and Policy Priorities | Third-party coverage of donor strategy | This blog post originally appeared on the GiveWell blog at https://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/24/thoughts-on-the-sandler-foundation/ prior to the Open Phil blog launch. The post is part of Open Phil research into how different foundations structure their operations and giving. The post covers the Sandler Foundation, which has an unusual giving model, sacrificing cause-specific, domain-expert "program officers" and instead having a small staff that would opportunistically shift between researching different giving opportunities. Successes of the Sandler Foundation were noted, including forming the Center for American Progress, ProPublica, Center for Responsible Lending, and Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and providing support to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The Sandler Foundation approach was described as follows: (1) The priority placed on funding strong leadership, (2) A high level of “opportunism”: being ready to put major funding or no funding behind an idea, depending on the quality of the specific opportunity. Ultimately, the post concluded that Open Phil would probably stick with the more standard program officer model and including a mix of larger and smaller grants. Reasons given were: (a) Open Phil's policy priorities mapped less clearly to existing political platforms than the Sandler Foundation's, so it would be harder to find fully aligned leaders, (b) Open Phil sees a good deal of value in relatively small, low-confidence, low-due-diligence grants that give a person/team a chance to “get an idea off the ground.” We’ve made multiple such grants to date and we plan on continuing to do so, (c) confidence in the Sandler Foundation's track record was not very high. However, Open Phil might experiment with using generalist staff in addition to program officers; the generalists would scan across issues to find and vet opportunities |
Graph of all donations (with known year of donation), showing the timeframe of donations
| Amount (current USD) | Amount rank (out of 4) | Donation date | Cause area | URL | Influencer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 250,000.00 | 3 | Macroeconomic stabilization policy | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project-2018 | Alexander Berger | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support the Full Employment Project." Donor reason for selecting the donee: This is an exit grant; the grant page says: "We continue to think the Project’s work is important but do not have a clear sense of how much of a difference marginal funding makes in driving that work forward. This grant will bring us to five years of supporting the Full Employment Project, and at this point we want to take the opportunity to step back and see if other funders may be interested in supporting the Project." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The amount is likely determined to be enough to provide about a year of support, as is typical for exit grants. Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): The timing is likely determined by the previous grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project-2016 (2016-07) running out. Intended funding timeframe in months: 12 Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: This is an exit grant, so there are no plans for further grants for the Full Employment Project. Open Philanthropy also made a grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-automatic-stabilizers (2018-05) to CBPP for automatic fiscal stabilizers, so it doesn't look like Open Philanthropy is exiting all grantmaking to CBPP. Other notes: Affected countries: United States; announced: 2018-08-02. |
|
| 100,000.00 | 4 | Macroeconomic stabilization policy/automatic fiscal stabilizers | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-automatic-stabilizers | Alexander Berger | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant "to support work on enhancing automatic fiscal stabilizers. Automatic fiscal stabilizers are taxes and government programs that respond automatically to changing economic conditions, and do not require additional Congressional action." Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "[Automatic fiscal stabilizers] are important for mitigating the effects of economic downturns. We believe CBPP, which has done work in this area before, is a strong candidate to advance these policies given its combination of relevant relationships and deep knowledge of these issues." Other notes: Affected countries: United States; announced: 2018-06-21. |
|
| 425,000.00 | 1 | Macroeconomic stabilization policy | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project-2016 | Alexander Berger | Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant to support the Full Employment Project. It renews the original grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project made in 2014. Open Philanthropy describes two main areas supported by these grants: (1) "Preparing for the next U.S. recession, which we would guess is likely to occur before interest rates return to “normal” levels." (2) "Making the case for the importance of continued focus on reducing unemployment and against premature monetary tightening today." The grant page also says: "Our understanding is that our marginal funding will support CBPP to undertake a project commissioning outside macroeconomists to develop their own estimates of potential output of the U.S. economy, based on the possibility that the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate may be too low." Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "It is also one in a series of grants attempting to build up the capacity of progressive think tanks on macroeconomic policy issues we see as important. [...] Our key uncertainty for this grant, along with our other grants to think tanks for work on macroeconomic policy, is whether work by think tanks on these issues is likely to sway decisionmakers at the Fed or in Congress. We would guess that the work we support is relatively unlikely to affect policy, but that if it did our support would be justified many times over, and we see that as a bet worth taking." Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): No explicit reasons for timing are given, but it looks like CBPP has found opportunities to expand the scope of the Full Employment Project around the end of its original 28-month duration. Intended funding timeframe in months: 24 Donor retrospective of the donation: The followup grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project-2018 (2018-07) is an exit grant, where Open Philanthropy writes: "We continue to think the Project’s work is important but do not have a clear sense of how much of a difference marginal funding makes in driving that work forward." Other notes: Affected countries: United States; announced: 2016-10-25. |
|
| 335,000.00 | 2 | Macroeconomic stabilization policy | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project | Alexander Berger | Donation process: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project#Our_review_process says: "CBPP approached us for support for the project after we had a general conversation about their history and track record and expressed interest in potentially funding advocacy around macroeconomic policy. We shared a draft version of this page with CBPP staff prior to the grant being finalized." https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project#Grant_documents lists a bunch of grant documents submitted. Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: Grant is for the Full Employment Project, with a total budget of $1,0005,000. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project#Grant_documents lists goals of the project, including: getting to full employment, setting a policy agenda for the next recession, and repairing ongoing damage from the Great Recession. Several anticipated activities include commissioning papers, developing options for strengthening automatic stabilizers, assessing and developing policy proposals, and making the case for "full employment" as a day-to-day goal. https://files.givewell.org/files/labs/macroeconomic-policy/CBPP%20Full%20Employment%20Project%20Proposal.pdf has more details. Donor reason for selecting the donee: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project#Case_for_this_grant lists reasons: (1) "CBPP’s proposed projects comport well with our provisional take on important topics for research and advocacy in macroeconomic policy." (2) "Because of the above point, we are comfortable with the potential fungibility of this grant." (3) "Beyond direct impact, there are notable benefits to making some early grants in a cause we are exploring (as is the case with macroeconomic policy)." Donor reason for donating that amount (rather than a bigger or smaller amount): The amount recommended for the grant, $335,000, is one-third of the total budget of $1,005,000 for the funded project (the Full Employment Project). The grant page says this is "[b]ased in part on the fact that CBPP was planning to approach three funders for this project". Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): The timing seems determined by the timing of CBPP approaching Open Philanthropy with the idea of the grant, and also by Open Philanthropy starting to explore grantmaking in the area. Intended funding timeframe in months: 28 Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: Since this fully funds one-third of the cost of the Full Employment Project, that is for a limited duration, it doesn't look like Open Philanthropy plans to provide follow-up funding for the project. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project#Plans_for_learning_and_follow-up lists some questions and plans for follow-up. Donor retrospective of the donation: Followup conversation with Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg of grantee organization at https://www.openphilanthropy.org/sites/default/files/Jared_Bernstein_and_Ben_Spielberg_10-21-15_%28public%29.pdf on 2015-10-21. A followup grant https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-budget-and-policy-priorities-full-employment-project-2016 for the Full Employment Project suggests continued satisfaction with the project. Other notes: Grant in two tranches. The grant page says: "Since we see support for this project as largely fungible with CBPP general support, we expect to make the grant formally unrestricted.". Affected countries: United States; announced: 2014-09-19. |