Methodology · current rules
Pledged ≠ paid.
We record pledges, transfers into donor-controlled vehicles, and verified payments to independent recipients as separate states. Only the payments enter deployed totals.
Capital lifecycle states
| Capital event | Counted as deployed? | Treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Public pledge, including a Giving Pledge signature | No | Shown as committed |
| Transfer into a donor-controlled foundation or DAF | No | Held in a controlled vehicle |
| 990-PF grant approved for future payment | No | Latest balance shown as awaiting; prior years not added |
| Verified payment to an independent recipient | Yes | Deployed; each evidence basis remains separate |
| Gift with amount withheld at recipient request | Gift counted; amount excluded | Amount remains unknown, never $0 |
Core sources · data run 2026-08-27
- Tier A IRS Form 990-PF Part XV (public domain): paid and future-payment grants remain separate; amended returns are deduplicated. Filings come through the GivingTuesday mirror.
- Tier A IRS Form 990-PF Schedule B (publicly inspectable for private foundations): qualifying contributions are kept in a separate vehicle-funding ledger. Names and amounts are preserved with the evidence; only reviewed names reach a public profile, and contributor addresses are excluded from curated and public data.
- Donor-published Gates Foundation grants database: lifetime commitments, not payments.
- Donor-published Yield Giving: paid gifts. We count gifts with withheld amounts but exclude their unknown value.
- Tier A CCEW annual return Part B (OGL v3): annual accrual totals for grants to institutions. We keep them separate from line items and convert GBP at the IRS yearly-average rate.
- Tier A OSCR filed accounts: only reconciled grant-note rows count. Hash-checked PDF snapshots support the published facts and regulator links.
- CC0 Wikidata: identity, citizenship, founder-linked vehicles, and dated net-worth estimates. The IRS Business Master File confirms vehicle identifiers.
The score uses one closed comparison window for everybody: FY2020–FY2024. FY2025 filings and payment evidence remain archived and visible as the next-year evidence layer, but do not enter the score while that year is still incomplete across source systems. The window advances automatically each calendar year with a two-year reporting lag, so next year's run will score FY2021–FY2025 and retain FY2026. We never substitute FY2020 for only the people missing FY2025.Giving rate divides deployed capital in that five-year window by a dated net-worth estimate only when numerator and denominator describe the same person-level scope. We show its date because estimates can be stale. A pooled vehicle's grants cannot be divided among its contributors or compared with one contributor's individual wealth, so its giving rate is shown as N/A.Pts indexes the same five-year capital to the board leader at 100. Neither rates character or effectiveness.
Who receives leaderboard credit
This is a person-indexed vehicle-deployment leaderboard. A row may headline a founder or principal contributor while the ranked grants were legally paid by a pooled philanthropic vehicle. In that case the row says so: the headline is an index into the evidence, not a claim that the named person solely owned, controlled, or financed every grant.
We model the chain separately as people or entities contribute capital → funding vehicle → legal payer → independent recipients. Schedule B contribution records sit in that inbound ledger and never enter deployed totals. They establish annual contributions to a vehicle; they do not establish which contributor funded a particular outgoing grant, so pooled grants are never allocated proportionally among contributors.
Transparency score · voluntary and statutory disclosure
Disclosure rules vary. US private foundations must name material Form 990-PF grantees. England & Wales charitable trusts need not name recipients while the settlor lives (Charities Act 2011 s.132(4)). We award 40 points for an open grants database and up to 30 for named-recipient coverage. Statutory detail and evidence currency add up to 15 points each. Profiles show every component and the local disclosure rules. With fewer than three loaded events, we show no score.
Geography · IRS codes are not ISO
IRS filings use FIPS-family country codes, not ISO 3166. Only 94 of 259 codes match ISO:SZ means Switzerland and SF means South Africa. Treating them as ISO would misplace $5.02bn and discard another $2.29bn; $3.18bn in Swiss grants would appear in Eswatini. We resolve every code through the IRS table and use the filing's address element to separate countries from identical US state codes. We count non-place codes such as OC but do not plot them.
What absence means
"No capital-event records loaded" describes this pipeline's coverage, not a person's giving. Most charitable donors face no US public-disclosure rule. Donor-advised funds and anonymous gifts can leave no public trail. Each profile states its verification scope and date.
Reproducibility & corrections
Every figure traces to an immutable, content-hashed source snapshot. The open-source pipeline and Git history record each correction and its evidence.