3 Million Contributions and a New Homepage

We crossed 3 million contributions this week. The team celebrated and I had a little pizza party. It has been a long time coming and we’re really happy to have hit it.

Here’s what else has been happening since our last update on February 3.

🏠 New Homepage

The homepage hadn’t changed since July 2025. At the time, the PatronView database had a fraction of the institutions and contributions it has now. The old homepage reflected that. It was basically just leaderboards. There wasn’t much to explore and it didn’t do a good job of showing what the site had grown into.

The new homepage is built around exploration. We added 227 internal links across the page, organized into sections that give you a real sense of how much is in the database:

• featured institutions,
• top funds,
• notable patrons,
• recent additions, etc.

The idea is that someone landing on the homepage should be able to find something interesting within a few clicks, not just see a list of the biggest donors.

🏛️ Fund Page Improvements

Fund pages got a lot of improvements. Here’s what changed:

1. About This Fund: Many fund pages now have a short prose paragraph describing what the fund is and what level of support it represents. Before, it was just a title, an institution name, and a table of patrons. Now there’s actual context.

2. Top Patrons leaderboard: Fund pages now show a leaderboard of the top patrons for that fund. If you’re looking at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum Patron’s Circle, you can see at a glance who the biggest supporters are.

3. Sibling fund links: Funds now link to other funds at the same institution. So if you’re on one tier’s page, you can easily browse to the other tiers at that institution without having to go back to the institution page. These are especially helpful for institutions with a lot of giving levels.

4. FAQ sections: Some fund pages now have a short FAQ section with structured JSON-LD schema markup. That means search engines can read the Q&A directly and potentially show it in search results.

5. Better titles and descriptions: Fund page titles now lead with the institution name rather than the fund name. That makes them more informative in search results and more consistent across the site.

👤 Patron Page Improvements

New “Also Supporting” Section: Patron pages now show a section linking out to other institutions the patron supports. Before, if you were looking at a patron like Jonathan N. Grayer, who gives to dozens of institutions, there was no easy way to browse their full footprint. Now there is. We think this helps people explore the database more naturally.

📖 Wikipedia Links

We’ve matched 12,226 patrons to their Wikipedia pages so far. Where a match exists, the patron’s page now links to their Wikipedia article and includes sameAs schema markup in the page’s structured data. That means search engines can confirm the connection between the patron in our database and their real-world identity.

Wikipedia matching also serves as a useful verification layer. It helps us confirm we have the right person. Down the road, we’re planning to use Wikipedia as a starting point for pulling in patron bios and profile photos. We estimate there are still 10,000 to 30,000 more patrons to find as we expand the matching process.

Patrons like Shirley E. Dearborn and Annette Kade Charitable Trust are good examples of the kinds of profiles we’re building out.

🏢 500 Institutions

We now have exactly 500 institutions in the database. You can browse all of them at patronview.com/institutions.

We also added favicon support for institution pages. Institutions with a favicon, like Boston Symphony Orchestra or Lincoln Center Theater, now show their logo next to their name. We’ve built in fallback handling so pages don’t break when a favicon isn’t available, and we’ll keep adding more as we go. This part of the script on the server actually keeps breaking, but I think we will fix it soon.

🔮 What’s Next

The database keeps growing. We have a cron running that adds new contributions regularly, and we expect to keep that pace through the rest of Q1.

The big push right now is on content quality. We’re working to make patron pages more differentiated. We’re adding bios, cross-links, and prose text that gives each page more substance. Wikipedia matching is a big part of that, and we expect to expand it over the next few weeks.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions or feedback, find me on LinkedIn or reach out at hello@nickgray.net.