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Giving is caring: understanding donation behavior through email

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Every day, thousands of people make donations to humanitarian, political, environmental, and other causes, a large amount of which occur on the Internet. The solicitations for support, the acknowledgment of a donation and the discussion of corresponding issues are often conducted via email, leaving a record of these social phenomena. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive large-scale data-driven study of donation behavior. We analyze a two-month anonymized email log from several perspectives motivated by past studies on charitable giving: (i) demographics, (ii) user interest, (iii) external time-related factors and (iv) social network influence. We show that email captures the demographic peculiarities of different interest groups, for instance, predicting demographic distributions found in US 2012 Presidential Election exit polls. Furthermore, we find that people respond to major national events, as well as to solicitations with special promotions, and that social connections are the most important factor in predicting donation behavior. Specifically, we identify trends not only for individual charities and campaigns, but also for high-level categories such as political campaigns, medical illnesses, and humanitarian relief. Thus, we show the extent to which large-scale email datasets reveal human donation behavior, and explore the limitations of such analysis.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
    February 2014
    1600 pages
    ISBN:9781450325400
    DOI:10.1145/2531602
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    Published: 15 February 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. charities
    2. donations
    3. email
    4. social factors

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    February 15 - 19, 2014
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    CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;
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    View all
    • (2023)Competing Imaginaries and Partisan Divides in the Data Rhetoric of Advocacy OrganizationsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100507:CSCW2(1-29)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2021)Factors Influencing Donation Intention to Personal Medical Crowdfunding Projects Appearing on MSNSJournal of Organizational and End User Computing10.4018/JOEUC.28757234:4(1-26)Online publication date: 17-Sep-2021
    • (2020)Religiosity and Generosity: Multi-Level Approaches to Studying the Religiousness of Prosocial ActionsReligions10.3390/rel1109044611:9(446)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2020
    • (2020)Mapping the Field of Donation-Based Crowdfunding for Charitable Causes: Systematic Review and Conceptual FrameworkVOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations10.1007/s11266-020-00213-wOnline publication date: 30-Mar-2020
    • (2020)Machine Learning the Donor JourneyAdvances in Artificial Intelligence10.1007/978-3-030-47358-7_38(368-374)Online publication date: 6-May-2020
    • (2019)Programmable DonationsProceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3290605.3300609(1-13)Online publication date: 2-May-2019
    • (2018)Applications of Social Identity Theory to Research and Design in Computer-Supported Cooperative WorkProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/32747712:CSCW(1-34)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2018
    • (2017)"Not by Money Alone"Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/2998181.2998245(1997-2009)Online publication date: 25-Feb-2017
    • (2017)Factors influencing intention to donate via social network site (SNS)Telematics and Informatics10.1016/j.tele.2016.04.00734:1(164-176)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
    • (2015)Participatory MilitiasProceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing10.1145/2675133.2675295(724-733)Online publication date: 28-Feb-2015

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