Mackenzie Scott’s new website Yield Giving is now accessible to the public. A cumulative gift database, it gives us a great deal of information the $14,000,000,000 she has given to 1,600+ non-profit teams… though 28% of the grants are missing key data points.
But let’s take a look:
In November 2022, after facing criticism about the secrecy of her gift giving, Scott promised a searchable gift database that would allow for more transparency in her philanthropy. Other third party websites like The Chronicle of Philanthropy had previously created databases, painstakingly constructing them from Scott’s blog posts (now also hosted on her website rather than Medium) however such databases were flawed from the start.
The information given in those blog posts was minimal and the effort required to make data points like geographic region and focus area took large swaths of time. By contrast, Yield Giving’s database simplifies the process while also providing some additional insights.
As promised, the site hosts details of each gift given by Mackenzie Scott, with filters and sorting by focus area, geography, and keyword. The database also details the gift amount and year. One of the best features is the ability to download the entire database as a CSV, allowing for much more granular analysis than what is offered on the more user-friendly web version.
Using the sort feature provided some insights. For example, 53% of all gifts went to education (844), with the majority heading to the South at 36% (305); just less than half of the environmental gifts went to nonprofits located in the United States.
Everything is self-identified by the nonprofits themselves, keeping with Scott’s assertion that the control should always remain in the hands of the nonprofit.
Disclosure Delays
There is at least one large limitations to this database, however. Many of the gifts from 2020 to present feature the note “disclosure delayed for the benefit of recipient” in the grant amount field, which accounts for more than one-quarter of all the Foundation’ gifts.