How The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 Was Compiled

Related Audio: Maria Di Mento, a Chronicle assistant editor, explains how the annual list is compiled.

The Chronicle’s 10th annual Philanthropy 50, a list of the most-generous donors, is based mainly on gifts and pledges of cash and stock to nonprofit organizations.

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. Many of the donors are prominent philanthropists, but few of them are the wealthiest people in America. Of the 400 wealthiest Americans listed by Forbes magazine, only 17 appear on the Philanthropy 50.

Although the newspaper attempted to compile all information about large contributions made by individuals in 2009, 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 the 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.

The Chronicle’s list does not include gifts from anonymous donors. The Chronicle published news of at least 87 anonymous gifts of $1-million or more last year. Those donations were worth a total of $591.8-million, a far fall from 2007, a record year in which the same number of gifts from anonymous donors totaled $1.1-billion.

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

Gift Transfers

The list does not include payments that donors made on pledges announced in previous years, in order to avoid counting the same gift twice.

The Philanthropy 50 list also does not include transfers of money or assets donors made from one foundation, or nonprofit group, to another. Two such large donations were announced in 2009. John C. Haas and his family directed $747-million through their foundation to the William Penn Foundation, a Philadelphia grant maker that Mr. Haas’s parents established in 1945. The money had been sitting in the family’s foundation and earning interest for many years, so it was not technically a new donation. Mr. Haas is the 91-year-old heir, along with other Haas family members, to the Rohm & Haas Company fortune.

In a slightly different situation, Lorry I. Lokey, the founder of Business Wire, transferred $110-million in assets from his Lorry I. Lokey Supporting Foundation at the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco to a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The $110-million was money Mr. Lokey had put into his supporting foundation over a period of years and that was reported on the 2004, 2006, and 2008 Philanthropy 50 lists.

Phillip T. Ragon, the founder of InterSystems Corporation, and his wife, Susan M. Ragon, created a family foundation last year through which they are establishing the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Institute, which will be dedicated to the discovery of an AIDS vaccine. When the couple announced the move last February, they pledged to give a total of $100-million through their new foundation to support the institute, but they would not disclose exactly how much they funneled into their foundation in 2009 to do so. The Ragons indicated that through their foundation they plan to award $10-million annually over 10 years to Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology to jointly run the Ragon Institute.

Estate Gifts

Two big donors who died in 2009 were not included on the Philanthropy 50 list. Ruth Lilly, who died in December at 94, was not included because she appeared on the 2002 list for $520-million in bequests she announced that year. Among those bequests was a $100-million donation to the Poetry Foundation (then called the Modern Poetry Association), to be paid over 30 years.

The amount of the gift, which was in the form of pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company stock, has since grown to $151-million, according to Anne Halsey, a foundation spokeswoman.

Also not on the list is Leonore Annenberg, who died in March, at 91. According to Forbes magazine, her fortune was worth $2.5-billion in 2008.

During her lifetime, Ms. Annenberg and her late husband, the publisher Walter H. Annenberg, gave away about $4.2-billion through their Annenberg Foundation, and it was assumed when she died that her money would go to the foundation. But Ms. Annenberg did not file a will; instead, her assets were held in a private trust, and officials of her estate declined to say exactly how much money she left to the foundation or to any other nonprofit organizations.

As the foundation’s chairwoman, Ms. Annenberg directed grant money to arts, culture, education, health and human-service groups, and other causes.

In the last year of her life, she authorized nearly $38.8-million in grants, including $10-million apiece to the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, in Philadelphia, for an arts and culture festival scheduled for 2011; and the Philadelphia Foundation, to support the Pennsylvania Institute for Instructional Coaching, a training and development program for high-school teachers.

The Philanthropy 50 list of 2009 was compiled by Maria Di Mento. She was assisted by Heather Joslyn, Caroline Preston, Joan Waynick, Ian Wilhelm, and Grant Williams.