How The Chronicle’s Survey of Last Year’s Top Donors Was Compiled

The Chronicle’s seventh annual list of the biggest donors is based on gifts and pledges of cash

and stock to nonprofit institutions. The newspaper publishes the list in conjunction with the online magazine Slate, which began publishing such rankings in 1996.

As a springboard, The Chronicle used information it has published in the last year; it also conducted additional research on wealthy people and their donations to charitable organizations.

Although The Chronicle attempted to compile all information about sizeable contributions made by individuals in 2006, not all donors disclose information about their gifts publicly and they are not required by law to do so.

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 decided on a beneficiary for the money.

Gifts That Count

The Chronicle counted only those gifts 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 for gifts to other types of tax-exempt groups, so gifts to other organizations were not counted, even if they were made to help others.

The Chronicle‘s list does not include gifts from anonymous donors, such as the $75-million an anonymous donor gave to Westmont College, in Santa Barbara, Calif., in October, or the $50-million another anonymous donor gave to the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, in November.

The donor who gave the money to Westmont said the college could use the money for any purpose, and the college’s trustees decided to use the money to build four new buildings: an arts center, a chapel, a residence hall, and a science center. The donor who made the gift to the University of Tennessee stipulated that half the money be used for programs in veterinary medicine and in the College of Engineering, and said the other half was to help renovate a stadium and for intercollegiate athletics.

This year’s survey ends the practice of counting payments that donors made on pledges announced in previous years, a change made in order to avoid counting the same gift twice. As a result, several donors who made notably large donations in 2006 do not appear on the list because their gifts were payments on pledges made in previous years.

This change means that some mainstays of previous lists were not included. Among them:

• William H. (Bill) Gates III and his wife, Melinda, who gave $316-million in 2006 to their foundation. The donation was the most recent payment toward the approximately $3.35-billion the couple pledged to the foundation in 2004.

  The couple paid $627-million of that pledge in 2004, and $320-million toward the pledge in 2005. Mr. and Ms. Gates currently have almost $2.1-billion remaining to pay on the 2004 pledge.

• Robert Edward (Ted) Turner gave $50-million in cash and Time Warner stock to the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund, both in Washington, last year. The donation 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 $652-million toward his 1997 pledge of $1-billion.

Also not on this year’s list is Sidney E. Frank, who died in January 2006 at 86.

Mr. Frank, the founder of Sidney Frank Importing Company, in New Rochelle, N.Y., and the creator of the Grey Goose vodka brand, ranked No. 9 on the list in 2004 for giving a total of $142-million away that year.

In January 2005, Mr. Frank told The New York Times that he planned to establish a charitable foundation and said, “it will have more than a billion dollars to work with.”

Officials of Mr. Frank’s estate declined to answer The Chronicle‘s inquiries about whether Mr. Frank ever created such a foundation and about any donations the estate may have made last year. There was no mention in Mr. Frank’s will, obtained by The Chronicle, of a foundation or bequests made to any nonprofit organizations.

Gifts of Art

Several significant art collections were donated to museums last year, but their donors were not included on The Chronicle’s list because the museums would not disclose the artworks’ dollar value, and another reliable, independent source to appraise the pieces could not be found.

Mary Griggs Burke, the granddaughter of Crawford Livingston and Chauncy Griggs, two St. Paul civic leaders who made their fortunes in lumber, railroads, and utilities, pledged to give a large portion of her 900-piece collection of Japanese art to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Museum officials said they have not determined how much money the collection is worth, but Ms. Burke’s collection is said to be one of the largest and most important troves of Japanese art outside Japan, and includes Buddhist and Shinto sculpture and painting, calligraphy, tea wares, and historic and contemporary ceramic and lacquer objects.

Helga Wall-Apelt, a physician and art collector in Sarasota, Fla., promised to give her collection of Asian art to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art at Florida State University, in Sarasota, plus $8-million to restore the museum’s Asian art wing, and to endow a curator post.

Museum officials said Ms. Wall-Apelt gave additional money to the museum last year, but would not disclose an amount. They said, however, that the cash plus the artworks she pledged to the museum could eventually total close to $50-million.

Another important donation last year was a collection of 139 rare music manuscripts, sketches, and engraver’s proofs, given to the Juilliard School, in New York, by Bruce Kovner, a New York hedge-fund manager, and chairman of the school’s Board of Trustees.

Officials at Juilliard declined to assign a value to the collection’s worth, but the institution and scholars familiar with Mr. Kovner’s collection consider it a valuable archive of primary source manuscripts.

Included in the collection are working scores with written corrections and notations by renowned composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Wagner, and many others, and a first-edition manuscript of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, thought by some to have been used for the first performance of the piece.

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The Chronicle‘s list of the biggest donors of 2006 was compiled by Maria Di Mento. She was assisted by Noelle Barton, Sam Kean, Nicole Lewis, and Ian Wilhelm.