Our process for publishing grant pages

When a grant is approved, we consider whether to publish a page for it.

If we decide to publish one, this is our standard process:

  1. Our communications team drafts language to describe the grant and why we made it.
  2. The grant investigator reviews the language and approves it for publication (sometimes with a round of edits first).
  3. The grant investigator may choose to send the page language to the grantee for review (the grantee sometimes offers suggestions to improve accuracy).
  4. We publish the page. 
    1. If the grantee requests it, we may sometimes wait to publish. For example, some grantees ask us to wait until they’ve distributed a press release or created a website to display their project.
    2. Sometimes, grant page publication is delayed as we work through a backlog of grant pages.
    3. In some cases, we publish a group of grants as a single page if they all have something in common (for example, grants for our university organizer fellowship).

 

We publish almost all of our grants, because we value openness and information sharing. But there are some grants we don’t publish, for reasons that include:

  • Safety concerns. For example, some of our grantees reside in countries whose governments have a history of targeting people who run charitable projects.
  • Impact concerns. For example, some of our grantees work on contentious political issues, and sharing information about their work could help their opponents prepare to counter them.
  • Privacy concerns. Some of our grantees ask us not to publish their grants out of a concern for privacy.

 

We sometimes publish information about contracts we’ve made for “grant-like” purposes (e.g. producing research on a priority topic), but not for other contracts.

In 2023, we changed how we write about grants to individual people; in most cases, those grant pages will no longer include individuals’ names (though they’ll still include the amount of funding and focus area). We’ve also edited some of our past grant pages to remove individual names.