Lists, Lists, Everything’s a List!

Lists, Lists, Everything’s a List!

We, Americans, have an obsession with lists, ranking everything from the best colleges (US News, among others) to the wealthiest individuals in the U.S. and the world (Forbes) to David Letterman’s daily “top 10” lists.  (I once even saw a ranking of the Top 10 of Letterman’s Top 10 lists!)   Some rankings are obviously helpful, some are meaningless and some are just plain entertaining.   As my favorite comedian Jerry Seinfeld said to the mythical Izzy Mandelbaum about his “World’s Greatest Dad” t-shirt (compared to Morty Seinfeld’s “#1 Dad” shirt):  “Well, I don’t know how official any of these rankings really are.” [i]
T-shirt contests notwithstanding, quantifiable lists do provide hard data that is useful to some and fluff to others.  For example, The Chronicle of Philanthropy recently ran an article about the 15 Biggest Charitable Gifts of 2013.  (15 instead of 10 because of ties – all at the “bottom end” of the contribution range.)  Anyway, I would rate this particular list somewhere between “mildly entertaining” and “somewhat interesting.”  Entertaining because it includes everyone from little pisher Mark Zuckerberg to grouchy old David Koch; interesting for the simple fact that every single gift was in excess of $100 million and the overall total was $3.4 billion.  This is serious money.  True, most of it was in the form of pledges rather than outright gifts but still……

(Click to enlarge)

What I found the most interesting, however, was the Zuckerberg gift, for several reasons:

1. First, the “little pisher” remark – Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan were the youngest donors on the list (he is 29; she is 28).  This gift sets a record for the under-30 set.
2. The Zuckerbergs chose to make their gift to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a local community foundation of the type about which I blogged last week.
3. The planned use of the funds was not made immediately public.  Did they give to the Community Foundation for the foundation to direct the ultimate giving, or did they set up their own charitable fund inside the foundation or some combination thereof?  Time will tell.
4. Most amazing is that this 2013 gift was not the first large gift Mark and Priscilla have made to this particular foundation. In December 2012 they donated their first tranche of 18 million shares of Facebook (worth around $500 million at that time) and in December 2013 they donated a second tranche of 18 million shares (worth around $992 million).  All of this from Facebook shares (Facebook!).  True confession:  Although I am an active user of the “social media network”, I still haven’t the foggiest idea of what Facebook really is!

Given the size and significance of the gifts, perhaps the Zuckerberg donations will help to put community foundations on the philanthropic map.  As noted last week, community foundations are in many ways philanthropy’s best kept secret.  It will be interesting to see.
A couple of other takeaways from the article:

• This list was a list of the largest single gifts; it was not a list of the most generous donors. That compilation will be released in February. My guess – lots of overlap.
• Overall, 2013 was apparently a good year for philanthropy.  Gifts of $1 million or more totaled nearly $9.6 billion in 2013 compared to $6.1 billion in 2012, a huge increase.  But this increase is a bit deceiving.  Despite last year’s economic gains, the wealthiest still did not give quite as much as they did before the recession.  But at least we are moving in the right direction.