How do I control WhoFundsWho?
Visit our How It Works page.
What are the sources for the information in the database?
Many organizations provide information about their funders on their website and/or in their annual reports. And grant making organizations typically have databases on their websites with information about the organizations they sponsor.
When this is not the case, or when information is incomplete, we did additional research, using various types of sources. These sources can be journalistic articles but also specialized websites such as:
In almost all cases, when an organization does not provide (sufficient) information about its funding on its own website and when that funding information is also not on the donor’s website or in their annual report, then we list the sources where we did obtain that information.
One of the goals for future updates is to also provide those direct links to the funding information listed on organizations’ or sponsors’ own websites.
Data on political campaign financing and revolving door employment comes mostly from the great OpenSecrets website. We are NOT affiliated with them but they permit non-commercial use of their data.
How accurate is the information in the database?
While we try to be as accurate as possible, we cannot guarantee that the funding information in the database does not contain any errors, as we explain on our Disclaimer page. We strongly recommend you do not rely solely on the information in the database. Always consult other sources to verify said information to be sure.
When categorizing organizations (what sector or industry do they operate in? what is the organization type? etc) we have also relied on some automation in the form of various LLMs. While we do perform a manual check on these results we do not manually check the results for each of the tens of thousands of organizations in the database. So please consider the categorizations as fallible guesstimates.
Also, while we use the great OpenSecrets for political funding and for revolving door data, this does not mean that any errors in those fields in the popups were in the original data. It is very possible that we made an error in our processing of those data.
If you spot any errors or inaccuracies please send us a message using the contact form.
How recent or up to date is the information in the database?
When listing the funders of an organization we have typically combined data from the past few years. For example, some of the donors may have donated in 2018, others in 2021, and others each of the past several years.
When an organization does not disclose the identities of its donors and when there is no recent but only older donor data available, we have also used the older data. That way we are at least able to give an impression of the types of funders that the organization used to have and may still have. Whenever we use older data we indicate so in a note.
As for the personnel information of organizations, we’ve included both recent and current employees. For people’s employment histories the data may go back decades.
What kinds of data do you collect about your users?
As we explain in more detail on our Privacy Policy page, WhoFundsWho performs all privacy sensitive operations locally, on the user’s local machine. No privacy sensitive information is sent to servers.
Is WhoFundsWho free to use?
WhoFundsWho is freely available to anyone at no charge. But in order to professionalize and expand the project we may in the future make some features only available to paid subscribers.
Who are you funded by?
So far it has been a labor of love and we have been entirely self-funded. But if you find the extension useful, please consider making a donation to help fund the research and development necessary to sustain and grow the database and improve the extension’s functionality and experience. Donations also decrease the need to make certain features only available to paid subscribers in the future.
Shouldn’t it be WhoFundsWhom?
It can be but it doesn’t have to. ‘Who’ and ‘whom’ are both grammatically correct. Besides, whom cares?
WhoFundsWho 