After installing WhoFundsWho from the chrome web store it will download the necessary keywords data and build the data structure that it uses to find matching keywords on webpages. This all happens in the background and does not require you to do or not do anything. Usually it takes less than a minute. Sometimes a bit longer. On the rare occasions that the build fails, open a new tab to let it re-try which typically solves the issue.
Once initialized, WhoFundsWho automatically begins highlighting on the webpage the names of organizations and people that are in its database. To get the funding information for the organizations and people, just hover over their highlighted names and a popup will open with that information.
customize your experience
In the user menu you can choose from various options that help you customize your user experience:
ON / OFF – Use this to turn the extension on or off. The default is ‘on’.
If you want WhoFundsWho to only be active when you tell it to, then choose the ‘off’ option and switch it to ‘on’ if you are on a webpage you’d like it to run on.
CLICK / HOVER – By default popups open when you hover over a highlighted name. Select ‘click’ to instead open them by clicking on the highlighted name.
The potential issue with the ‘click’ option is that sometimes the names that the extension finds and highlights on the webpage were already hyperlinked on the original page. And the hyperlink applied by the extension may then override the original hyperlink so that the original link is no longer accessible.
This conflict is avoided by choosing ‘hover’ to open the popup which leaves the webpage’s original click action intact.
QUICK / FULL – The ‘quick’ option loads the popup with only the most important information whereas the default ‘full’ shows all available information.
The full version also shows both text and image whereas the quick version only shows text.
FIRST FEW / ALL – When the default ‘all’ is selected, all instances of each matching name are highlighted whereas ‘first few’ highlights only the first few instances.
The reason for this option is that if the name of an organization or person is frequently mentioned on a webpage it may become distracting or visually unappealing if each instance of that name is highlighted.
INCLUDE PEOPLE – Check or uncheck ‘include people’ to make WhoFundsWho look for people in addition to organizations.
With people the risk of false positives is considerably greater than with organizations. Whereas organization names are often unique, the same can’t be said for people’s names. So WhoFundsWho may be highlighting the names of people who are in its database while on the webpage those names may refer to completely different people who just happen to have the same name as people in the database.
CATEGORY CHECKBOXES – Choose one of up to 11 different categories of organizations & people.
If for example you are only interested in information about think tanks, then check that option. If you want the extension to alert you whenever the organizations or people you are reading about are funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or have some affiliation with the World Economic Forum, then check those options.
Some categories have significantly more entries than others. For example, the ‘think tanks’, ‘countering disinformation’, ‘revolving door’, ‘gates foundation’, ‘wellcome trust’, ‘world economic forum’ categories provide extensive coverage of their respective domains while the research for the ‘media’, ‘democracy promotion’ and ‘environmentalism’ categories is in its early stages and coverage of these domains is much more limited. This should change in the near future.
ALL WEBSITES / SELECT – By default the extension runs on all webpages but you can also specify the websites that you want the extension to run, or not run, on.
Click the ‘select’ link to open the form where you can specify the specific URLs, check the ‘select’ radio button, and then decide whether the extension should or should not run on the websites you specified.
TEXT / HIGHLIGHT / NO – Select the highlight and text colors WhoFundsWho uses to indicate which names on the webpage WhoFundsWho has created popups for. Check the ‘none’ box to remove highlighting and use only the text color to indicate this. Click the reset button to return to the default text and highlight colors. Click the ‘info’ button for more information about different color combinations as well as some suggested defaults.
Some users prefer darker highlight colors with light text and some prefer more subtle and lighter highlight colors with dark text.
People with color blindness can choose the combination that works best for them.
If you prefer not to use highlighting at all because it makes the text feel to ‘busy’ you can remove highlighting and instead only use the text color to indicate the names hyperlinked by WhoFundsWho on the webpage.
HEIGHT / WIDTH – Change the default dimensions of the popup.
While you can manually resize the popup using the drag handles, these new dimensions are not saved. To save new dimensions so that next time the popup opens it uses those new dimensions, change the values of the Height and Width boxes in the user menu. The minimum and maximum height are 200 & 1,000px respectively, and the minimum and maximum width are 280 and 1,000px. Click on the Reset button to return to the default values. Those default height and width values are 700 and 480px.
Note that changes that you make in the menu won’t become active until you refresh the page or open a new page, tab or window.
The category checkboxes and the ‘include people’ checkboxes are the exceptions. When you check or uncheck a checkbox the extension will immediately, in the background, start to rebuild the data structure it uses for the keyword search to reflect the new selections. This usually only takes a few seconds but sometimes a bit longer.
opening and controlling the popup
As for the popup that opens on the webpage, you can:
- resize it
- drag it
- export the contents as a .csv file
- return to the top after having scrolled down
- move back and forward between different states of the popup
For more information, see the FAQ. Run into any technical problems? Check out the troubleshooting page.
WhoFundsWho 