How The Chronicle’s Ranking of America’s Top Donors Was Compiled

The Chronicle‘s ninth annual Philanthropy 50, a list of the most-generous donors, is based on gifts and pledges of cash and stock to nonprofit institutions.

As a springboard, The Chronicle used information it has published in the last year about donations of $1-million or more from individuals; it also conducted additional research on wealthy people and their donations to charitable organizations last year.

Although the newspaper attempted to compile all information about large contributions made by individuals in 2008, not all donors disclose information about their gifts publicly and they are not required by law to do so.

Criteria for Gifts

Gifts that donors made from their family foundations were not counted, to avoid including donations twice — when the donor gave money to the foundation and when the donor selected a beneficiary for the money.

The Chronicle counted only those gifts that donors made to organizations classified as charities or foundations under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Donors are not allowed to claim charitable deductions on their income taxes for gifts to other types of tax-exempt groups, even if they were made to help others.

No Anonymous Donations

The Chronicle’s list does not include gifts from anonymous donors, such as the $110-million gift to New York University Langone Medical Center for its Tisch Hospital, because the family that donated the money asked hospital officials not to name them.

Including the donation to the medical center, The Chronicle published news of at least 63 anonymous gifts of $1-million or more last year. Those donations were worth a total of $576-million.

The newspaper publishes its list of most-generous donors in conjunction with the online magazine Slate, which began publishing such rankings in 1996.

The list does not include payments that donors made on pledges announced in previous years, in order to avoid counting the same gift twice. As a result, some notably large donations made in 2008 were not included on the Philanthropy 50 list because their gifts were payments made on pledges announced in previous years.

Among those donors was Warren E. Buffett, who gave 451,250 shares of Berkshire Hathaway class “B” stock, worth approximately $1.8-billion in 2008, to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in Seattle.

The donation was the most recent payment on the pledge of 10 million shares Mr. Buffett made to the Gates foundation in 2006, the largest donation ever made. At the time Mr. Buffett’s pledge was announced, the value of 10 million shares of Berkshire stock was pegged at approximately $31-billion by the Gates foundation.

When he made his first payment on the pledge, in August 2006, the closing price of the stock was worth $3,206.04 a share, but the value of the stock has fluctuated mightily since then.

By the middle of January 2007 for example, it was worth more than $3,600 a share. Yet while the stock price has since fallen — on January 15 of this year it was worth $3,093 a share — the value of Mr. Buffett giving 10 million shares of Berkshire stock now stands at about $30.9-billion, not a substantial difference from when the pledge was announced.

Including his 2008 payment, Mr. Buffett has given a total of slightly more than 1.4 million shares of stock to the Gates foundation, and he has about 8.6 million shares remaining to pay.

The value of the total donation to the foundation depends on the future performance of the stock market and, ultimately, on the economic health of the country.

Mr. Buffett also made payments on additional pledges he made in 2006.

He gave 45,125 shares of Berkshire stock worth more than $180.4-million to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, in Omaha, which is named after his first wife. In addition, he gave 15,794 shares of Berkshire stock worth approximately $63-million in 2008 to each of his three children’s foundations. He has promised to give a total of 350,000 shares to those foundations.

Another big donor, Ted Turner, made a payment on a previous year’s pledge in 2008.

Mr. Turner gave $50-million in cash to the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund, both in Washington, in 2008. The gift was a payment toward a $1-billion pledge Mr. Turner made in 1997 to establish the foundation and the fund. To date, Mr. Turner has paid a total of slightly more than $752-million toward the pledge.

Bill Gates, and his wife, Melinda, declined through a foundation spokeswoman to say how much they gave in 2008 toward the approximately $3.3-billion that Mr. and Ms. Gates pledged to the foundation in 2004. The couple paid $627-million of that pledge in 2004, about $358-million in 2005, approximately $370-million in 2006, and about $1.3-billion in 2007. They have nearly $695-million remaining to pay on the 2004 pledge.

Missing in Action

Several big donors who usually land on the list did not give enough money in 2008 to make it onto the list.

One donor, the oil mogul T. Boone Pickens, who ranked No. 8 on the 2007 list for giving $200.8-million to his foundation, said the current economic crisis influenced his decision not to give as much money to charity last year. Mr. Pickens gave about $4.6-million to nonprofit groups in 2008.

Some big donors said they gave less in 2008 for reasons other than the recession.

Pierre Omidyar, who founded the online auction site eBay, and his wife, Pam, who gave $97.8-million to their Omidyar Network and other nonprofit groups in 2007, gave $21.5-million in 2008 to a variety of nonprofit organizations, including the Hawaii Community Foundation, in Honolulu and Maui; HopeLab, in Palo Alto, Calif.; and Humanity United, in Redwood City, Calif.

A spokeswoman for the Omidyars said the couple gave less in 2008 not because of the economy, but because their Omidyar Network had enough money to fulfill its grant-making commitments.

Also not on the list is Thomas M. Siebel, founder of the software company Siebel Systems, and his wife, Stacey, who gave $156.6-million in 2007, and Oprah Winfrey, who donated an estimated $50.2-million to charitable groups that year.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Winfrey declined to comment on Ms. Winfrey’s decision to give muchless — about $3-million — to nonprofit groups in 2008.

The Siebels, who gave $126,124 to nonprofit groups in 2008, did not respond to The Chronicle’s inquiries about their philanthropy.

A searchable database of information about the donors on the Philanthropy 50 is available online.

The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 list was compiled by Maria Di Mento. She was assisted by Noelle Barton, Candie Jones, Cassie J. Moore, and Ian Wilhelm.