What can donor data tell us about generosity?
In Singapore, where I’ve lived for the better part of 12 years, there’s an enduring myth. There’s probably a similar myth where you live too:
“People just don’t care”
In fact, just this week, the 2018 Singapore National Values Assessment asked Singaporeans to describe the values of their fellow citizens. They came back with “competitive”, “materialistic” and “self-centred”.
This certainly fits with the story we hear often around us, but is it really true? Are we really doomed to walk this earth surrounded by the heartless and careless?
Raisely is a fundraising platform, we power online donations for hundreds of charities across the world. As I write this, we have processed almost 360,000 donations to date. So surely we could infer a thing or two about people’s generosity from that?
For starters, since we have processed donations in Singapore dollars, it would certainly appear that there are generous people in Singapore, but let’s dig a bit deeper.
Grouping data by currency and taking 6 popular currencies, there are two ways we could look at generosity: opt-in rate and median donation amount.
(I’ve left out Euros as comparing to all of Europe would be comparing apples to durians)
As we’re a non-profit ourselves, we recoup our platform costs through an opt-out platform fee collected at the end of the donation process. So how often people opt to cover those costs may imply an additional generosity.
To fairly compare median donation amounts, we’ll compare them relative to their country’s average monthly disposable income
So, are Singaporean’s more selfish? Far from it based on these results. They’re up there with the best for opt-in rate, and they’re tied for first place with Canada for the size of their donations relative to median income.
(Since online donations are done by choosing from a list of dollar handles that increment in 10’s or 20’s, the slight difference between Canada and Singapore would be a result of donations rounding to the nearest $10 amount in their currency)
There are limits to this though. Could we say that Australian’s are the least generous? I don’t think so. Raisely was born in Australia and the lower median donations and lower opt-in rates are more likely a reflection of the much higher usage of Raisely in a variety of different fund-raising campaigns that reach a wider variety of income levels in Australia.
So it looks like we don’t have to prepare to live in a heartless world just yet.
If you like learning from your donation data, check out Raisely. We give you full access to your data to download into spreadsheets, or connect to other apps through our API. It’s yours to use, forever.
Get an overview of what Raisely can do for you and your organisation with a 30 minute video-call presentation at demo.raisely.com or just go ahead and sign up for free
