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 | americanprogress |
| Website | https://www.americanprogress.org/ |
| Twitter username | amprog |
| Wikipedia page | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_American_Progress |
| Instagram username | americanprogress |
| Tumblr subdomain | amprog |
Full donee page for donee Center for American Progress
| 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 | 1 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 |
| Macroeconomic stabilization policy | 1 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 |
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 | 2016 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Macroeconomic stabilization policy (filter this donor) | 1 | 500,000.00 | 500,000.00 |
| Total | 1 | 500,000.00 | 500,000.00 |
Skipping spending graph as there is at most one year’s worth of donations.
| 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 1) | Donation date | Cause area | URL | Influencer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 500,000.00 | 1 | Macroeconomic stabilization policy | https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/us-policy/macroeconomic-policy/center-american-progress-macroeconomic-stabilization | Alexander Berger | Donation process: The grant page's "Our Process" section says: "Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute had mentioned CAP to us in 2014 as an organization to consider supporting for macroeconomic policy work, but we had not prioritized a conversation because of CAP’s limited work in the area to date. However, when we first spoke with Marc Jarsulic in 2015, he expressed interest in hiring someone to work on macroeconomic stabilization and told us that lack of resources had been the main barrier to prioritizing work in the area. After several subsequent conversations, we decided to recommend a grant of $500,000 over two years." Linked sources include https://www.openphilanthropy.org/files/Grants/CAP/OPP_Monetary_Policy_Plan.pdf (CAP's monetary policy plan) and https://files.givewell.org/files/conversations/Konczal%201-23-14%20(public).pdf (2014-01-23 conversation with Mike Konczal). Intended use of funds (category): Direct project expenses Intended use of funds: CAP's plans include: "(1) Hold convenings to better understand the field (2) Produce research reports documenting important factors in macroeconomic stabilization (e.g. the impact of the Taylor rule on income distribution) (3) Produce policy proposals (4) Use its network and outreach capacity to share its research and proposals with the media, Congress, presidential administration, and Federal Reserve." Donor reason for selecting the donee: The grant page says: "CAP provided us with a list of proposed research topics, all of which struck us as potentially worthwhile. Our primary goal for this grant is to increase progressive capacity and attention around macroeconomic policy and business cycle issues. Our impression is that, while there are many labor economists working at progressive think tanks, significantly less attention has been devoted to monetary policy and other macroeconomic stability issues, and that CAP plays a particularly prominent role in setting, and reflecting, the progressive agenda." Donor reason for donating at this time (rather than earlier or later): The timing seems to be determined by the evolution of conversatioons between Open Phil and CAP. The grant page's "Our Process" section says: "Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute had mentioned CAP to us in 2014 as an organization to consider supporting for macroeconomic policy work, but we had not prioritized a conversation because of CAP’s limited work in the area to date. However, when we first spoke with Marc Jarsulic in 2015, he expressed interest in hiring someone to work on macroeconomic stabilization and told us that lack of resources had been the main barrier to prioritizing work in the area. After several subsequent conversations, we decided to recommend a grant of $500,000 over two years." Intended funding timeframe in months: 24 Donor thoughts on making further donations to the donee: Further grants are not explicitly discussed; the grant page says: "To follow up on this grant, we expect to have a conversation with CAP staff every 6-12 months for the next two years, with public notes if the conversation warrants it. Towards the end of the grant, we plan to attempt a written update about how we see the grant overall." Donor retrospective of the donation: As of late 2021, there are no further grants from Open Phil to the grantee in this area. Other notes: The grant page lists three main reservations: (1) "Our basic theory of the case could be wrong for any number of reasons [...]" (2) "CAP could be the wrong partner. [...] macroeconomic stabilization policy could turn out to be a bad fit for the organization." (3) "As always within this area, we could be mistaken about which sorts of policy changes would be beneficial.". Affected countries: United States; announced: 2016-04-19. |