Funding

Full Fact is a registered charity. We’re funded by people like you, by charitable trusts, and by other funders. All the details are on this page.

Our running costs consist mostly of paying staff and renting office space in London. We have the usual overheads of any organisation, from computer equipment and internet connections to doing our accounts. We are based in London so that we can meet with central government and major media outlets without the expense of constant travel. We'd like to thank everybody who donates and makes our work possible.

Neutrality

We have rigorous safeguards in place at every level of our organisation to ensure our neutrality. These have been carefully constructed based on advice from our board and examples ranging from Amnesty International to the BBC. They include the cross-party board, fundraising safeguards, a conflict of interests policy, restrictions on staff political activity, feedback processes, operating guidelines, external reviews, and more. Most importantly, they include carefully recruiting staff who are sensitive to these issues.

Ultimately, it is for our audience to judge for themselves whether we succeed—we would encourage readers to judge our individual fact checks and our body of work as a whole. We provide links to all sources so that you can check what we’ve said for yourself.

Individual supporters

We are very grateful for the support of our readers, who donate thousands of pounds to Full Fact every month. You can help Full Fact grow, and check more facts, by donating.

Funders

We would like to thank all of our funders. All donations greater than £5,000 received are listed here along with the amount they gave and what it was given for.

Our funders have no input into our editorial content or decision making.

Google.org £285,128.45 Full Fact AI
Google AI for Good Impact Challenge £198,690.84 Full Fact AI
Thousands of individual donors and gift aid £374,064.32 Core funding
Facebook £290,775.69 Third Party Fact Checking programme
Mohn Westlake Foundation £275,000 Core funding
Luminate £147,592.76 Core funding
Nuffield Foundation £100,000 Fact checking and annual report
WhatsApp £84,834.23 WhatsApp fact checking service
Baillie Gifford £50,000 Core funding
John Ellerman Foundation £50,000 Core funding
Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust £50,000 Core funding
Pears Foundation £50,000 Core funding
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation £46,667 Core funding
Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust £40,803.34 Full Fact AI
The Dulverton Trust £35,000 Core funding
European Media and Information Fund £31,208.29 Health fact checking - clinical misinformation
Garfield Weston Foundation £30,000 Core funding
Gill Family Foundation £30,000 Core funding
Full Fact Training sales £29,150.50 Core funding
William de Winton £10,000 Core funding
Tinsley Charitable Trust £10,000 Core funding
International Fact Checking Network & National Endowment for Democracy £8,083.66 Fact-Checkers Working Together Research Program
Full Fact AI sales £6,000 Core funding
Peter Cooper £5,036 Core funding
Cecil Pilkington Charitable Trust £5,000 Core funding
Evan Cornish Foundation £5,000 Policy: Online Safety Bill
Facebook £305,119.64 Third Party Fact Checking programme
Facebook £116,352.14 Framework for collaboration during misinformation crises
Facebook £59,634.83 Health fellowship
Thousands of individual donors and gift aid £370,148 Core funding
Mohn Westlake Foundation £250,000 Core funding
Google AI for Good Impact Challenge £235,222.77 Automated fact checking
Nuffield Foundation £100,000 Fact checking and annual report
Luminate £75,789.87 Core funding
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation £68,333.33 Core funding
WhatsApp £61,809.84 WhatsApp fact checking service
International Fact Checking Network & WhatsApp £53,737.20 Vaccine Grant Program
Baillie Gifford £50,000 Core funding
John Ellerman Foundation £50,000 Core funding
Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust £50,000 Core funding
The Buchanan Programme £49,801.68 Core funding
The Dulverton Trust £35,000 Core funding
Gill Family Foundation £30,000 Core funding
James Padolsey £30,000 Core funding
International Fact Checking Network & National Endowment for Democracy £26,576.58 Fact-Checkers Working Together Research Program
Colefax Charitable Trust £25,000 Core funding
The M J Samuel Charitable Trust £17,500 Core funding
International Fact Checking Network & YouTube £17,064.56 Fact Checking Development Grant
Highway One Trust £10,000 Policy team
William de Winton £10,000 Core funding
Reed Foundation £9,000 Core funding
Good Thinking Society £8,000 Core funding
Dorothy Bishop £6,000 Core funding
Cecil Pilkington Charitable Trust £5,000 Core funding
Tinsley Charitable Trust £5,000 Core funding
Facebook £325,224.43 Researching the challenges of online fact checking and support for our work on a framework for collaboration during misinformation crises
Facebook £258,759 Third Party Fact Checking programme
Luminate £383,082.48 Core funding
Thousands of individual donors and gift aid £369,505.52 Core funding
Mohn Westlake Foundation £250,000 Core funding
Google AI for Good Impact Challenge £117,140.54 Automated fact checking
Google News Initiative £115,669.68 Covid-19 fact checking
Google Digital News Initiative £13,112 Third Generation Fact Checking
Nuffield Foundation £100,000 Fact checking and annual report
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation £90,000 Core funding
Garfield Weston Foundation £30,000 Core funding
International Fact Checking Network £18,643.03 Fact Checking Development Grant
WhatsApp £18,193 WhatsApp fact checking service
Gill Family Foundation £14,000 Core funding
Nesta Democracy Pioneers fund £10,000 Core funding
William de Winton £10,000 Core funding
The Buchanan Programme £8,720 Core funding
Owen Williams £5,944.80 Core funding
Facebook £563,775 Promoting international standards for sharing fact checks
Facebook £232,400 Third Party Fact Checking programme
Luminate £371,554 Core funding
Luminate - Research grant £76,603 Research project with Africa Check and Chequeado
Google AI for Good Impact Challenge £193,475 Automated fact checking
Hundreds of individual donors £160,803 Core funding
Nuffield Foundation £100,000 Fact checking and annual report
Nuffield Foundation £60,000 General election
Vodafone Techstarter £35,000 Automated fact checking
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation £25,000 Core funding
Colefax Charitable Trust £25,000 Core funding
TTO Conference Ltd £17,500 Earned Income
Ndemic Creations £10,000 Core funding
William de Winton £10,000 Core funding
Cecil Pilkington Charitable Trust £5,000 Core funding
Australian Bureau of Statistics £5,000 Earned Income
Google’s Digital News Initiative grant fund £210,445 Third Generation Fact Checking
Google £20,000 Automated fact checking
Omidyar Network £115,000 Automated fact checking
Hundreds of individual donors £74,796 Core funding
Open Society Foundations £71,917 Automated fact checking
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation £40,000 Core costs to improve effectiveness and impact and explore new income streams
Barrow Cadbury Charitable Trust £30,000 Core funding to enable Full Fact to develop its capacity, reach and services
Colefax Charitable Trust £25,000 Core funding
Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust £20,000 Core funding
University of Edinburgh £12,634 ‘Fact’ Transmission and Persuasive Power in a Digital World
Peter Samuel Charitable Trust £10,000 Core Funding
William De Winton £10,000 Core Funding
Other £25,069  

Our 2017 corporate supporters are listed below.

Facebook gave £75,000, and Google Digital News Initiative gave £165,000. In 2017, corporate donations added up to £240,000, or 25% of our total income of £956,000.

You can read more information about funders from 2017 and earlier here.

Our 2016 corporate supporters are listed below.

Each of our corporate supporters gave £5,000, with the exception of the City of London Corporation, who kindly gave £20,000. In 2016, corporate donations added up to £50,000, or 8% of our budget of £627,000.

We host the Google News Lab Fellowship each summer and in 2016 Google provided a £6,400 stipend for us to support this scheme.

In 2016 we received £10,000 from the Economic and Social Research Council, with £10,00 more arriving in 2017, and £20,000 from the Office for National Statistics to set up the Need to Know project. We are also grateful for £5,000 of research support funding provided by the Centre for European Legal Studies, of the University of Cambridge.

You can read more information about funders from 2017 and earlier here.

You can read our Annual Accounts and Reports on the Charity Commission website.

Funding from Facebook

Since January 2019, Full Fact has checked images, videos and articles on Facebook as part of the social network’s third-party fact checking initiative. This work is funded by Facebook. The amount of money that Full Fact is entitled to depends on the amount of fact checking done under the programme.

We publish independent reports on our experience of Facebook’s programme and our recommendations for how Facebook and the UK government can improve the quality of information on the platform. Our first report was published in July 2019.

Practical support

Our web hosting is very kindly provided by Bytemark Cloud Servers. We like Bytemark so much that we were paying for their services. Then Matthew Bloch, their Managing Director, saw us on BBC Question Time and emailed to say they would stop charging. It was a lovely message to receive, late at night after a hard evening’s work. Now they’re making it possible for us to run an ever larger and more complex site with no fuss and completely free.

If you've noticed beautiful images on our site or social media, there's a good chance they were donated by Alamy, the world's largest online stock photo agency. After meeting their CEO James West by chance, he immediately saw how much timely relevant images would make a difference to us. Within a week Alamy gave us an amazing Christmas present—access to their 90 million images to help make sure the facts stand out from the noise.

In 2019, we were joint winners of Google’s AI for Social Good Challenge for our work developing world-leading automated fact checking tools. Our prize was three years of funding and support from the Google.org Fellowship, which saw seven Google developers volunteer with our team for six months. The Fellows helped us build AI tools to help fact checkers detect claims made by key politicians, then group them by topic and match them with similar claims from across media outlets, social media, and parliamentary records.

We also benefit from a general Google Grants scheme for charities which provides $10,000 worth of Google advertising per month. They do not have any say in how we spend them.

Thanks again to all our supporters. If you'd like to join them, check out our donate page.

Full Fact fights bad information

Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.