To what degree is the content on OWID decided by OWID vs influenced by donors?
For example, I vaguely remember seeing that Longview had donated to OWID then also noticed OWID’s newer work on longtermism. Was there any relation between these and generally how do you try to maintain editorial independence when soliciting donations from foundations/donors who have specific objectives?
100% of the content we publish is planned, decided, and created by our team, without direct input from funders or donors.
Generally, we work hard to convince funders to give us unrestricted grants. But some grants we receive are restricted, which means they are tied to a list of deliverables. When we’ve accepted restricted grants:
They’ve only ever been tied to general, non-specific outputs such as “expanding our work on COVID-19”, “producing a Global Health Explorer”, “maintaining the content in our SDG Tracker”, or “improving our content on democracy”. This means funders never tell us how to produce this content, what the data should show, what insights users should learn, what they should think about an issue after reading it, etc.
Funders never get to review or influence the deliverables at any point. Grant reports are typically sent once a year, in which we tell funders, “This year, we produced these things as part of the deliverables for this grant”, and link to the content live on our site.
The Longview grant was an unrestricted grant allocated to OWID in 2020, which we used for product development across the site (see our 2020 annual report, page 9). Our article on longtermism was published around two years later, and was entirely disconnected from this donation.
(As a slightly pedantic point: in a very vague and indirect way, there’s of course a link there: Longview sees OWID as a charity that cares about the long-term flourishing of humanity, and so they gave us money. And because OWID is a charity that cares about the long-term flourishing of humanity, we thought it’d be great to introduce our audience to longtermism. So these things are not entirely disconnected from a sociological point of view. But in terms of money, deliverables, and editorial freedom, we always make sure they’re wholly disconnected.)
To what degree is the content on OWID decided by OWID vs influenced by donors?
For example, I vaguely remember seeing that Longview had donated to OWID then also noticed OWID’s newer work on longtermism. Was there any relation between these and generally how do you try to maintain editorial independence when soliciting donations from foundations/donors who have specific objectives?
Hey James – great question, thanks!
100% of the content we publish is planned, decided, and created by our team, without direct input from funders or donors.
Generally, we work hard to convince funders to give us unrestricted grants. But some grants we receive are restricted, which means they are tied to a list of deliverables. When we’ve accepted restricted grants:
They’ve only ever been tied to general, non-specific outputs such as “expanding our work on COVID-19”, “producing a Global Health Explorer”, “maintaining the content in our SDG Tracker”, or “improving our content on democracy”. This means funders never tell us how to produce this content, what the data should show, what insights users should learn, what they should think about an issue after reading it, etc.
Funders never get to review or influence the deliverables at any point. Grant reports are typically sent once a year, in which we tell funders, “This year, we produced these things as part of the deliverables for this grant”, and link to the content live on our site.
The Longview grant was an unrestricted grant allocated to OWID in 2020, which we used for product development across the site (see our 2020 annual report, page 9). Our article on longtermism was published around two years later, and was entirely disconnected from this donation.
(As a slightly pedantic point: in a very vague and indirect way, there’s of course a link there: Longview sees OWID as a charity that cares about the long-term flourishing of humanity, and so they gave us money. And because OWID is a charity that cares about the long-term flourishing of humanity, we thought it’d be great to introduce our audience to longtermism. So these things are not entirely disconnected from a sociological point of view. But in terms of money, deliverables, and editorial freedom, we always make sure they’re wholly disconnected.)