One thing I can never figure out is where the missing Open Phil donations are! According to their own internal comms (e.g. this job advert) they gave away roughly $450 million in 2021. Yet when you look at their grants database, you only find about $350 million, which is a fair bit short. Any idea why this might be?
I think it could be something to do with contractor agreement (e.g. they gave $2.8 million to Kurzgesagt and said they don’t tend to publish similar contractor agreements like these). Curious to see the breakdown of the other approx. $100 million though!
We’re still in the process of publishing our 2021 grants, so many of those aren’t on the website yet. Most of the yet-to-be-published grants are from the tail end of the year — you may have noticed a lot more published grants from January than December, for example.
That accounts for most of the gap. The gap also includes a few grants that are unusual for various reasons (e.g. a grant for which we’ve made the first of two payments already but will only publish once we’ve made the second payment a year from now).
We only include contractor agreements in our total giving figures if they are conceptually very similar to grants (Kurzgesagt is an example of this). Those are also the contractor agreements we tend to publish. In other words, an agreement that isn’t published is very unlikely to show up in our total giving figures.
We publish our giving to political causes just as we publish our other giving (e.g. this ballot initiative).
As with contractor agreements, we publish investments and include them in our total giving if they are conceptually similar to grants (meaning that investments aren’t part of the gap James noted). You can see a list of published investments by searching “investment” in our grants database.
One thing I can never figure out is where the missing Open Phil donations are! According to their own internal comms (e.g. this job advert) they gave away roughly $450 million in 2021. Yet when you look at their grants database, you only find about $350 million, which is a fair bit short. Any idea why this might be?
I think it could be something to do with contractor agreement (e.g. they gave $2.8 million to Kurzgesagt and said they don’t tend to publish similar contractor agreements like these). Curious to see the breakdown of the other approx. $100 million though!
We’re still in the process of publishing our 2021 grants, so many of those aren’t on the website yet. Most of the yet-to-be-published grants are from the tail end of the year — you may have noticed a lot more published grants from January than December, for example.
That accounts for most of the gap. The gap also includes a few grants that are unusual for various reasons (e.g. a grant for which we’ve made the first of two payments already but will only publish once we’ve made the second payment a year from now).
We only include contractor agreements in our total giving figures if they are conceptually very similar to grants (Kurzgesagt is an example of this). Those are also the contractor agreements we tend to publish. In other words, an agreement that isn’t published is very unlikely to show up in our total giving figures.
I’m guessing $10M-$50M to something like Impossible Food, and $50-100M to political causes
We publish our giving to political causes just as we publish our other giving (e.g. this ballot initiative).
As with contractor agreements, we publish investments and include them in our total giving if they are conceptually similar to grants (meaning that investments aren’t part of the gap James noted). You can see a list of published investments by searching “investment” in our grants database.