Landscape

The Landscape of U.S. Funder Groups

Using United Philanthropy Forum's membership list as well as our own research of explicitly faith-based groups, we created a database, hosted on MySQL, of 74 funder groups and their members, in addition to four faith-based groups that do not have public membership lists. In total, we identified 6,213 unique members across all funder groups, with significant overlap of members belonging to more than one funder group. We determined the religious classification (faith-based or secular) of each member organization by matching the EIN number, where available, with Dr. Fulton’s database. We were able to determine the religious classification of approximately 30% of our member organizations.

For all data requests, please email Dr. Brad R. Fulton at fulton@iu.edu. 

Location of Funder Group Networks

We used Form 990 data and LinkedIn to identify the city and state headquarters in which our 78 funder groups operate. Adding these fields to our dataset, as well as the locations of member organizations where possible, we constructed a visualization in Tableau representing the geographical distribution of funder groups and their members, shown below. Large red nodes indicate funder group locations, and smaller multicolored nodes indicate a funder group member.