How The Chronicle Conducted Its Survey of America’s Largest Grant Makers

April 9, 2009 | Read Time: 4 minutes

The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual survey of the nation’s largest private foundations is based on information from 187 grant makers.

Much of the information in the survey was compiled from a Chronicle questionnaire, completed by 112 of those foundations. Data on the other foundations come from their informational tax returns, which must be made available to the public.

Assets at 104 of the foundations (those that provided information for the last two years) dropped by 24 percent to a combined total of $163-billion in 2008. The 10 wealthiest accounted for nearly $88-billion of those assets, or about 54 percent.

The country’s largest private grant maker remains the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle, with assets of an estimated $30-billion at the end of 2008. (By comparison, the second largest grant maker, the Ford Foundation, in New York, had an estimated $9.5-billion in assets as of December.) Removing Gates from the survey group leaves $133-billion in assets, and the nine other wealthiest foundations accounted for nearly $58-billion of those assets, or about 40 percent.

The pool of organizations selected to participate in the survey was drawn from information supplied by the Foundation Center, in New York, an organization that conducts research on grant makers. The center ranked the 150 largest private grant makers by assets and the amount they gave in the most recent fiscal year for which data were available.

To make those cutoffs, foundations had to have assets of at least $373,978,151, or have awarded at least $21-million in grants in the fiscal year ending in 2007, the most recent year for which all the foundations had audited financial information. The Chronicle also included foundations that met one of those standards in the 2008 fiscal year.

Seventy-five organizations that met one of those requirements declined to participate in the survey. Some have policies against participating in surveys, but others said they did not have the time or resources to respond.

For such organizations, The Chronicle used data from their most recently completed Form 990-PF, the informational tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

All but one foundation contacted for a copy of their Form 990-PF either provided the document to The Chronicle or made it available online for public inspection.

The remaining entity, the Reiman Foundation, in Milwaukee, did not respond to repeated requests. The Chronicle has informed the IRS that the foundation did not comply with federal law, which requires that the document be sent within 30 days to anyone who provides a written request.

Much information reported for 2008 is estimated or unaudited, and is subject to change, foundations told The Chronicle. The Northwest Area Foundation, in St. Paul, the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust, in Phoenix, and the Spencer Foundation, in Chicago, submitted data for the years ending in March 2008 and 2009, and figures for 2009 may be estimated.

Interpreting the Data

Readers should take care when examining a foundation’s giving and asset figures from year to year, because individual circumstances may render the figures not easily comparable. For example, the Energy Foundation, in San Francisco, is in the process of changing its status with the IRS from a foundation to a charity, a process it expects to complete by the end of 2010. It is allowed to accept grants and donations from other entities, but still operates as a foundation by awarding its own grants to other entities, and by filing the form required of foundations.

Foundations that are set up as “pass-through” funds — meaning they receive and distribute all their assets each year — are also included in the survey and their status is noted on the tables.

Two big grant makers that stopped operating because their assets were invested in the Ponzi scheme run by Bernard L. Madoff were regular and longtime participants in The Chronicle‘s annual survey. They were the Picower Foundation, in Palm Beach, Fla., and the JEHT Foundation, in New York. (See article on Page 18.)

Data from all the organizations for which The Chronicle obtained financial information are presented in a searchable database online. Go to: http:// philanthropy.com/premium/stats/foundation.