About PatronView

PatronView is a fundraising research platform created by me, Nick Gray. I'm the founder of Museum Hack and author of the book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party. Connect with me on LinkedIn. Sometimes I forget to check that, so send me an email if you want to get in touch.

Museum Hack

For eight years, I led Museum Hack as Founder and CEO. We reimagined the museum experience for a new generation of audiences.

Museum Hack grew to over 60 employees giving tours at major museums across the US. Our work leading renegade museum tours caught the attention of major media—the New York Times featured us as "Museum Tours for People Who Don't Like Museums," Forbes wrote about how we were disrupting traditional museum models, The Washington Post covered our creative approach to engaging new audiences, The Wall Street Journal featured our "tasting-menu approach" to the art museum tour, and Bloomberg Businessweek highlighted how our "Renegade Museum Tours Lure Newbies, Bros, and the Easily Bored."

During my time at Museum Hack, we worked with dozens of museums globally, including the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery in DC, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Getty Museum in LA, and more. The company also did professional development, event production, and major consultations with nearly 100 institutions including the National Park Service, California Academy of Sciences, Corning Museum of Glass, and the Florida Museum of Natural History. I eventually sold the company in 2019.

Through this experience, I gained 10+ years of insight into analyzing cultural philanthropy and understanding the critical role donors play in sustaining our cultural institutions.

Why PatronView?

My eight years leading Museum Hack provided firsthand insight into how essential private donations are for cultural institutions. Working closely with development teams at dozens of museums, I witnessed the challenges they faced in identifying and cultivating new donors—especially younger generations.

This inspired me to create PatronView in June 2025. It was mentioned on the My First Million podcast by Shaan Puri and Sam Parr as an innovative approach to democratizing philanthropic data.

PatronView started with New York City's premier institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Opera, The Morgan Library, and Carnegie Hall. Today the database covers more than 600 museums and cultural organizations in 45+ states, including board and trustee rosters drawn from IRS Form 990 filings.

PatronView creates detailed patron profiles that showcase the great contributions that a wide variety of individuals make to support these organizations—making this previously scattered information accessible and actionable for the first time.

How It Works

PatronView compiles philanthropic donor data from major museums and cultural organizations across the United States—more than 600 institutions in 45+ states, and growing. What began as a New York City project now has deep coverage in cities like New York, Houston, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia.

My software transforms scattered donor information into explorable, comprehensive patron profiles that reveal the full scope of someone's giving across different institutions.

Alongside donor listings, PatronView also tracks museum governance: board of trustees rosters for more than 470 institutions, built from officer and trustee data in IRS Form 990 filings. See the Metropolitan Museum of Art's board for an example. Board service and philanthropy overlap heavily, and connecting the two is something no other public resource does.

Who Benefits from PatronView

For the Public

Explore and celebrate the incredible generosity that sustains our cultural institutions. Browse patron profiles to discover the individuals and families whose contributions make world-class art and culture accessible to millions. See how philanthropy shapes institutions like The Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA.

For Fundraising Professionals

Access comprehensive donor intelligence that was previously scattered across hundreds of documents. PatronView helps development and fundraising departments:

• Identify emerging donors and their giving patterns across multiple institutions
• Research prospective donors' philanthropic interests and capacity
• Understand peer institutions' donor cultivation strategies
• Discover connections between donors for more effective cultivation

The site shows what's public, and teams that need the whole record can license the full dataset: every listing, every institution, every year, with a source citation on every line. Send me a prospect or alumni list and I'll tell you which of those names appear in published donor rolls, where, at what level, and in which years. Exports, API access, and Salesforce or other CRM integrations are available by request.

Work in development or fundraising? I'm giving fundraisers early access to our advanced data features. Email me at nick@patronview.com and tell me where you work or what data you're looking for, and we can help.

Data Sources & Methodology

My database draws from IRS Form 990 filings—including the Part VII officer and trustee rosters that power our board of trustees pages—along with annual reports, institutional publications, and official documents. Patron profiles are also cross-referenced against Wikipedia where a well-sourced match exists. This information has never before been aggregated in one searchable platform.

For detailed information about our data sources, verification process, and how to submit corrections, see the Where Our Philanthropic Data Comes From section on our Privacy Policy page.

Technology and Credits

Stetson helped build the original MVP of this website. Today I have help from Mohamed, an engineer at my family office, in developing features and adding new data.

I love Cloudflare, and this website runs almost entirely on their platform:

• Cloudflare Workers - the entire site is server-side rendered at the edge
• Cloudflare D1 - serverless database holding millions of donor records
• Workers KV - edge caching for patron, fund, and board data
• Cloudflare R2 - object storage for patron profile photos
• Cloudflare AI Gateway - routes and monitors our AI bio-generation pipeline
• Cloudflare Email Sending - powers the removal request form
• Cloudflare WAF - custom firewall rules and rate limits that keep scrapers out (99% of my website traffic is bots)

Beyond Cloudflare:

• Astro - for fast, server-side rendered pages
• Google Gemini 3.5 Flash - database categorization, cleaning, and patron biographies
• Claude Code - AI pair programming

Follow Along

I write about what we're building on the PatronView News blog: new data imports, top-donor rankings, and behind-the-scenes engineering notes. Subscribe via RSS.

Contact Information

You can reach me personally at:

• Email: nick@patronview.com
• Phone: +1-917-635-9967 (yes, that's my actual cell number!)

My mailing address is 1900 Barton Springs Road #1006, Austin TX 78704.

I welcome feedback and suggestions for improving PatronView. If you have ideas for new features, or if you want early access to search the database as a fundraiser, please email nick@patronview.com.