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Donation
Gravity: An Analysis of Donations Made to the Red Cross through Amazon's
Honor System
Article by John
S. Rhodes
Summary
In light of recent terrorist
attacks on the United States, Amazon.com set up a page to collect donations
for the Red Cross. Over the course of about two and half days, I recorded
the donation activity on that page. An analysis of the data revealed that
the average amount of money donated by each person steadily increased (i.e.,
donation gravity). This manifestation of donation gravity is discussed,
along with several usability ideas that can help you design a better online
donation web page.
Background
For the last two and a half
days I have been regularly tracking the donations
to the Red Cross at Amazon.com. At first, I simply refreshed the page
and watched the numbers jump. It was somehow addicting. I assumed that some
other folks were doing the same thing so I decided to keep track of the data
on a spreadsheet. As I write this, I have captured over 130 data points for
this analysis.
At this time, donations are
well over $5 million. That is really wonderful.
Review of the Data
Below are two charts of the data so that you can quickly understand some
interesting trends.
Figure 1.
Total number of donations recorded over the
course of about two and half days.
Figure 2.
Average amount of money each person donated
over the course of about two and half days.
There are other data, of course, but these are the most interesting to talk
about. The smooth upward trend seen in Figure 1 seems to indicates that
there was no real spike in the number of donations. They have just flowed
in, in a linear fashion. This is interesting to me because the Amazon
donation page for the Red Cross seems to be getting more and more publicity.
And, Amazon's home page is basically dedicated to this effort. I'm surprised
that the upward trend is not geometric, or a least not more bumpy. Very
interesting.
Figure 2 illustrates something truly remarkable. It indicates that as
time goes on, each person is making a larger and larger donation. I'll be
honest, I expected the average to remain the same from hour to hour and day
to day. However, on average, each next donation seems to be a little bit
larger. For lack of a better term, I'm going to call this donation gravity.
That is, as time goes on, as the impact of the tragedy reaches more people,
and as the total donation pot grows, people seem to be willing to donate
more money.
The one caveat I need to make in relation to donation gravity is that
Amazon started with a donation range of $1 to $50. That is, you were not
able to donate more than $50. However, at some point in time over the last
day, they raised the limit to $100. That makes this data series a bit more
difficult to analyze. However, the data indicate that there was not a sharp
increase in the average donatation amount. Instead, it just seems that as more
giving happens, and as people see it increase, they become more
generous.
The Psychology of Giving
Donation gravity seems to be a very special
social force online. Out of the 130+ data
points I have, there are only one or two instances where the average
donation amount decreases. In other words, this isn't just a trend that I
extrapolated from the data. It is not a line based on a regression analysis. Instead, the
raw data I have indicate that people just keep giving a little bit more money. Donation
gravity is an extremely interesting manifestation.
Donation gravity is an
interesting phenomenon that requires more investigation. Is it an
online manifestation only? Do organizations see these kind of data when they have pledge
drives? How do donations work really work? What is the psychology of
giving? In case there aren't any good answers, let's start treating donation gravity as a simple theory.
Usability Implications
What can we learn from this exercise? There are three usability ideas to
keep in mind. First, do not limit that amount of money that people can
donate. Although there was no noticeable spike in the amount of each
donation when the upper limit was raised from $50 to $100, I read many
complaints from people that wanted to donate more. Remove the ceiling!
Side note: Amazon has the suggested donation amount set at $10. I don't
know if it is too much or too little. Or just right. Again, this is
something that will require investigation in future research.
The second usability idea is that
you should allow people to donate odd
amounts of money. Very odd. Don't limit donations to whole dollars. The data
clearly indicate that people are willing and able to donate fractions of
dollars. In other words, if someone wants to donate $11.73, let them. Don't
force them to donate $11 or $12. I would venture that thousands of dollars
were collected because Amazon was intelligent enough to let people donate
fractions of dollars. Wise move!
The third core usability idea is that
you should allow people to see
progress in real time. When the browser is refreshed, let people see that
more money has shown up. Granted this is not always possible due to the
technology or because there aren't enough users making contributions, but
the more you can show progress, the better. I would venture that showing
progress increases the strength of donation gravity. I will admit that I was
like a rat in this respect. I kept hitting the refresh button on my browser
to see how much money was being donated to the Red Cross.
I'm sure there are other
usability implications, but what I have addressed will start the
conversation.
Comments? Send them to me. john@webword.com
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