Effective number of funders
How many equally-sized funders would produce the same concentration as the real, uneven set.
An organization with twenty funders may still depend on one of them for most of its money. Counting funders hides that; the effective number does not. It answers how many equal-sized funders would give the same concentration as the uneven set actually present.
It is the inverse Herfindahl index of the funding shares. Twenty funders of equal size gives an effective number of twenty; twenty funders where one supplies almost everything gives a number close to one. The gap between the two counts is the dependency.
Related terms
Questions and answers
- What is a effective number of funders?
- How many equally-sized funders would produce the same concentration as the real, uneven set. An organization with twenty funders may still depend on one of them for most of its money. Counting funders hides that; the effective number does not. It answers how many equal-sized funders would give the same concentration as the uneven set actually present.
More from the funding graph
The unnamed billions
grants reported with no recipient in the public record
The regranting layer
51% of grant dollars land in the regranting layer
The DAF merry-go-round
$9.7B circulates between donor-advised funds
The endowment market
who holds foundation money, and what just moved
The camps
funders cluster by geography, not ideology
By state
where grant money is based, and what stays home