Our World in Data

• 1. Introduction

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  Our World in Data almost turned down a $7.5 million grant in 2022, when FTX's Future Fund offered it to support the organization's work. Max Roser told Fortune that the group's board of trustees rejected the money after running due diligence and other checks. That refusal raises a question worth sitting with: what kind of organization turns down that kind of money, and why?

• 2. Charts And Categories

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  As of April 2024, Our World in Data sorts its charts and articles into ten categories, from Population and Demographic Change to Violence and War. In between sit Health, Energy and Environment, Food and Agriculture, Poverty and Economic Development, and Education and Knowledge. The list continues with Innovation and Technological Change, Living Conditions, Community, and Wellbeing, and Human Rights and Democracy.

  The team builds interactive charts and maps to present its research, often widening the lens from a single headline to changes across decades. That decision to track decades instead of headlines means the site's usefulness keeps compounding as more data arrives.

• 3. Building The Team

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  Max Roser began building Our World in Data in 2011, working largely on his own in the project's earliest years. He developed the publication together with Sir Tony Atkinson, a researcher who specialized in economic inequality.

  Hannah Ritchie joined the team in 2017 and went on to become Head of Research. Edouard Mathieu joined in 2020 and took on the role of Head of Data. By the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization employed six staff members, a number that grew to 20 by late 2021. In 2019, Our World in Data won the Lovie Award, a European award for web-based work. That same year, it was named one of three nonprofit organizations chosen for Y Combinator's Winter 2019 cohort. The team that had grown to keep pace with a widening mission was about to face its biggest test yet: a global pandemic.

• 4. Tracking A Pandemic

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  Beginning in 2020, Our World in Data shifted part of its focus toward publishing global data and research on the COVID-19 pandemic. The team created and maintained a worldwide database on COVID-19 vaccinations. That data was used as a source by the World Health Organization, researchers, other international organizations, academic journals, and numerous newspapers.

  The team also built a global COVID-19 testing dataset relied on by the United Nations, the White House, the World Health Organization, and epidemiologists and researchers worldwide. It published additional figures on hospitalizations and computations of excess deaths. In 2021, the team began campaigning for the International Energy Agency to make the energy data it collects from national governments publicly available. Feeding all of that public data took money, and meeting that need would soon test the organization's grant-makers and donors alike.

• 5. Grants And Donors

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  The Nuffield Foundation, a London-based foundation focused on social policy, gave Our World in Data its first grant. Other funders have included the Quadrature Climate Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and German philanthropist Susanne Klatten. Past grants have also come from the World Health Organization, the UK's Department of Health and Social Care, and the Effective Altruism Meta Fund.

  Reader donations matter too: more than 3,000 people supported the project in 2020, a figure that passed 4,000 by 2023. Donors have included Jamie Metzl and YouTuber Hank Green. The research team has also collaborated with the science YouTube channel Kurzgesagt. During the pandemic, the group partnered with epidemiologists from Harvard's Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Koch Institute. Together they studied countries that had responded well in the pandemic's early phase. Economists Janine Aron and John Muellbauer worked with the organization to research excess mortality during the pandemic. All of that funding underwrote a publication that, within a few years, readers across the world were turning to directly.

• 6. Readers And Reach

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  In 2021, the Our World in Data website drew 89 million unique visitors. The publication has been cited in academic scientific journals, medical and global health journals, and social science journals. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Economist have all used it as a source.

  The site publishes under permissive licenses that let others copy, modify, and distribute the work. Its content carries a Creative Commons Attribution license, and its software carries the MIT License. That open licensing means the charts and underlying data can travel beyond the original publication, into other people's research, journalism, and teaching.