New Footer, Related Patrons Algorithm, and SEO Improvements

Hi! It’s been about a month since my last update in mid-October. The leaves are changing colors and falling here in Austin, Texas.

But you know what’s not falling? The growth of this website!

Our database finally crossed 1,000,000 contributions and our daily visitor numbers are up 250%. This has been exciting but also means we need to keep optimizing to handle the load. Plus, I’m making plans to help us grow the database to over 5,000,000 contributions.

Anyhow. Here are some of the major improvements.

🦶 New Footer Design

The footer is the bottom part of the website that appears on every page. I’m a little embarrassed about how the old footer looked. For how much money and time we’ve spent on the site, it needed to feel more professional and help represent the entire depth and breadth of what we’ve built.

The new footer has:

• Two-column layout with main information on the left and newsletter signup on the right
• Lots of links to our most popular institutions
• Contact information including links to remove your data and get in touch
• Clean, modern design with underlined links and consistent fonts throughout
• Better navigation to help visitors discover different parts of the site

The new footer makes the site feel more professional and helps visitors navigate to important pages like our latest blog posts and contact information.

🔗 Related Patrons Algorithm

We continue to work on the Related Patrons section that appears on a lot of our patron pages. This feature helps you discover other donors with similar giving patterns, but the algorithm is quite difficult to get right.

The challenge is finding the right balance of relevance versus quantity of matches when we have hundreds of thousands of people in the database. We’re trying to give proper weight to high-signal connections.

For example:

• Board service overlap: If someone has served on the board of trustees with another patron for several years, that’s a strong signal they’re related
• Committee membership: Donors serving on similar committees at multiple institutions likely know each other
• Special interest groups: Donating to the same specialized funds or programs suggests shared philanthropic interests

We also want to ensure that related patrons are distributed across our database – not just showing the same small group of ultra-wealthy donors on every page.

This is still very much a work in progress, and we keep adjusting the algorithm to improve relevance. You can see examples of related patrons on pages like Agnes Gund or Leonard Lauder.

📅 Last Updated Date

Patron pages now show when the data was last refreshed. This gives visitors a better idea of how current the information is for each individual patron.

You’ll see Last updated: [date] near the top of all of the patron pages now. This helps you understand if you’re looking at recent data or if a patron’s information hasn’t been updated in a while. As we continue to add new documents and expand the database, this timestamp becomes increasingly useful for researchers tracking philanthropic patterns over time.

⚡ Enhanced Caching for Performance

As the site has grown in popularity, we’ve implemented enhanced KV caching across the platform. This reduces database queries by roughly 35-72% depending on the page type.

For users, this means a faster site. For us, it helps bring down our costs as traffic increases and our database is read billions of times per month. We’re now caching fund available years, institutions page data, and homepage statistics with longer time-to-live (TTL) values.

Technical details for the nerds:

• Fund available years cached with 30-day TTL
• Institutions page data cached instead of querying on every visit
• Homepage and institution stats extended to 24-hour TTL
• Reduces load on Cloudflare D1 database as we scale past 1,000,000 contributions

The site has gotten much more popular this month, so these optimizations help us maintain fast load times without dramatically increasing infrastructure costs. A bunch of search engine and AI bots also hammered the site this month, so that resulted in a big spike in database reads and resulting costs.

🔍 SEO Improvements

We’ve made several improvements to help Google better understand and index the site:

JSON-LD Schema Markup – Added ProfilePage and BreadcrumbList structured data to patron, fund, and institution pages. This helps Google display rich snippets in search results and improves rankings for patron profiles.

Visual Breadcrumbs – Patron pages now include breadcrumb navigation showing the path from homepage to institution to patron. This improves both user navigation and SEO.

Better Internal Linking – Added clickable institution and fund links on patron pages, plus permanently underlined all links across the site for better visibility and accessibility.

These changes help researchers discover patron profiles through Google search and make it easier to navigate between related pages on the site.

🗑️ Patron Removal Requests

We added an admin tool to handle patron removal requests. Visitors can request to have their data removed, and we track each request to ensure the data is hidden from the Internet.

Here’s something interesting: despite having hundreds of thousands of patrons indexed in our database, we’ve only received 6 removal requests so far. When we do remove someone, their page is immediately blocked and all cached data is cleared.

Other Updates

A few other small improvements:

Fixed donation calculations – We corrected the math to use range average instead of maximum values when calculating total donations. This gives more accurate totals for patrons who appear in tiered giving levels (like “$50,000-$99,999”).

Improved page spacing – Reduced excessive white space and improved typography across patron pages.

Better link visibility – Made all links permanently underlined on leaderboard pages for improved accessibility. If you have other accessibility suggestions, please let me know!

What’s Next

We’re continuing to refine the Related Patrons algorithm and expand the database with more institutions and documents. We’re also working on better tools for data quality and exploring new ways to visualize philanthropic contributions. Hopefully with nice visual improvements to each of the patron pages.

We also spend a lot of time on data quality and accuracy. I’m excited about Google’s new Gemini 3.0 model that will help us in processing our data troves.

The site keeps growing, which is exciting. If you have feedback or feature requests, connect with me on LinkedIn or email me at nick@patronview.com.

Thanks for following along with these updates! If you’re in America, I hope you have a Happy Thanksgiving.

– Nick Gray