A few years ago I built EffectiveAltruismData.com which looked like this:
But anyway, I never got around to automating the data scraping, and the website ended up hopelessly out of date.
So I killed it.
But it recently occurred to me that I could do the data scraping, data aggregation, and data visualisation, all within Google Sheets.
So with a bit of help from Chatty G, I put together a spreadsheet which:
Downloads the latest grant data from the Open Philanthropy website every 24 hours (via Google Apps Scripts).
Aggregate funding by cause area
Aggregate funding by organization.
Visualise all grant data in a pivot table that lets you expand/aggregate by Cause Area, then Organization Name, then individual grants
But note that expanding/collapsing counts as editing the spreadsheet, so you’ll have to make a copy to be able to do this.
You can also change the scale of the bar chart using the dropdown
And you can sort grants by size or by date using the “Sort Sheet Z to A” option on the Amount or Date columns.
Here’s a link to the spreadsheet. You can also find it at www.effectivealtruismdata.com.
Other funding legibility projects
Here’s another thing I made. It gives time series and cumulative bar charts for funding based on funder and cause area. You can hover over points on the time series to get the total funding per cause/org per year.
The data comes from this spreadsheet by TylerMaule.
Another thing which may be of interest is openbook.fyi by Rachel Weinberg & Austin Chen, which let’s you search/view individual grants from a range of EA-flavoured sources.
Openbook gets its data from donations.vipulnaik.com/ by Vipul Naik.
I’m currently working on another spreadsheet which scrapes, aggregates, and visualises all the Vipul Naiks’s data.
Feedback & Requests
I enjoy working on spreadsheets and data viz and stuff. Let me know if you can think of any other stuff in this area which would be useful.
Feels like someone should fund this work.
Maybe I should give a bit to this? I guess I can put it down as GWWC?