How The Chronicle Compiled Its List of the Biggest Donors

For the fourth consecutive year, The Chronicle has compiled a list of America’s most generous donors.

Published in conjunction with

the online magazine Slate, which began compiling such rankings in 1996, the list contains paid gifts and pledges, not only of cash but also of such goods as artwork and musical instruments.

Not all donors disclose their gifts publicly, so The Chronicle used a variety of sources to compile the list. Not only did it attempt to solicit information directly from donors, but it also sought information from hundreds of charities and foundations about large donations they received in 2003. The Chronicle also used information that it first published last year in its biweekly listing of major gifts. Such gifts usually are reported by the organizations that received them.

In addition, the newspaper used as starting points for its research such published resources as Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States and BusinessWeek‘s list of the nation’s top 50 philanthropists.

The Chronicle‘s list is not meant to be a comprehensive summary of all large donations made in 2003. Donations do not appear if they were made anonymously. And gifts that donors made from their family foundations were not counted, to avoid including donations twice — when the donor gave money to a foundation and when the donor decided on a beneficiary for that money.

For instance, Bill and Melinda Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and his wife, distributed about $1.2-billion last year through their private foundation to fight malaria and AIDS in Africa and support public schools in the United States, among other causes. But the Gateses, who were on The Chronicle‘s list of the big donors in 2000 and 2001, did not make it into this year’s ranking because they did not put additional money into their foundation in 2003.

Not on the List

Also not on this year’s list are Haim and Cheryl Saban. The Sabans donated approximately $100-million to more than 100 nonprofit organizations in the United States and Israel last year, according to the Saban Family Foundation. But Mr. Saban, founder of Saban Entertainment and chief executive officer of Saban Capital Group, and his spokesman declined to clarify what donations to the foundation or to specific charities were made in 2003.

The film director and producer Steven Spielberg made donations last year totaling approximately $12-million, according to a spokeswoman for his company, Dreamworks SKG. But The Chronicle did not include Mr. Spielberg on the list because the spokeswoman declined to specify the names of beneficiaries and gift amounts.

George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management, a private investment-management firm, also is not on the list, even though a spokesman for his Open Society Institute said his donations totaled in the tens of millions. The spokesman said he could not give an accurate figure for Mr. Soros’s philanthropy because his gifts were divided among a network of foundations.