How do I control WhoFundsWho?

After installation, click on the extension in the address bar to open the menu. Any option you select in the menu becomes active after you refresh the screen or open a new tab or window.

To turn WhoFundsWho on or off:

To choose whether the popup should appear when you click on a highlighted word or when you hover over that word:

The advantage of ‘hover’ is that original hyperlinks on a page don’t interfere with the extension. If instead of ‘hover’ you select ‘click’ then if you click on a highlighted name that was originally also a hyperlink the hyperlink rather than the popup will open.

The downside of selecting ‘hover’ is that popups may appear if you just happen to hover over a highlighted word for a bit too long even if you didn’t intend to open it. And that can get annoying.

To include or exclude people in the results:

WhoFundsWho will by default only check if any organizations mentioned on the page occur in the database (the ‘political funding’ category is an exception). But if you check the ‘include people’ box WhoFundsWho will also try to find matches for people (experts, leaders etc).

The reason you may not want to check the ‘include people’ box is that the database contains the names of tens of thousands of people. This may generate enough matches and highlights during the course of your ordinary browsing that it can get annoying. Especially because some percentage of those matches will be erroneous. Names are hardly unique to a single person, so if you are reading an article about what happened to Mary Williams the accountant for the local bingo league you may instead get a popup with information about Mary Williams the military analyst at a Raytheon funded think tank.

Lastly, it is often not necessary to make WhoFundsWho look for people. When experts are featured on a page usually the organization(s) they work for is also mentioned. And the extension will still detect and highlight that organization’s name so that you can see who that organization is funded by. If you then want to learn more about the specific expert you can always check the ‘include people’ box and see if their name gets highlighted on the page and hence more information about the person —for example, other organizations they may have worked for— is available in the database.

However, for people affiliated with the World Economic Forum or people who received grants from the Wellcome Trust there is often no such relation between person and organization. So for those categories you should check the ‘include people’ box if you want information not just about organizations but also about individual people.

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. When this is not the case, or when information is incomplete, we did additional research, using various types of sources.

For example, grant making organizations typically have databases on their websites with information about the organizations they sponsor. So some of our information comes from there. Some other websites that have frequently proven useful in our investigations are:

InfluenceWatch
Wikispooks
SourceWatch
On Think Tanks
Conservative Transparency
ProPublica
Duke Reporters’ Lab

In most cases, when an organization does not provide (sufficient) information about its funding on its own website or in its annual reports we have listed the sources where we obtained that information.

Data on political campaign financing comes entirely 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 information in the database does not contain any errors. 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.

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. And for people’s employment histories the data may go back decades.

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.

Shouldn’t it be WhoFundsWhom?

It can be but it doesn’t have to be. ‘Who’ and ‘whom’ are both grammatically correct. Besides, whom cares?