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 timerelated 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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW |
| Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
| Pages | 1297-1307 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781450325400 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jan 2014 |
| Event | 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014 - Baltimore, MD, United States Duration: 15 Feb 2014 → 19 Feb 2014 |
Other
| Other | 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014 |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| City | Baltimore, MD |
| Period | 15/2/14 → 19/2/14 |
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Keywords
- Charities
- Donations
- Social factors
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Software
- Computer Networks and Communications
- Human-Computer Interaction
Cite this
Giving is Caring : Understanding donation behavior through email. / Mejova, Yelena; Weber, Ingmar; Garimella, Venkata Rama Kiran; Dougal, Michael C.
Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW. Association for Computing Machinery, 2014. p. 1297-1307.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Giving is Caring
T2 - Understanding donation behavior through email
AU - Mejova, Yelena
AU - Weber, Ingmar
AU - Garimella, Venkata Rama Kiran
AU - Dougal, Michael C.
PY - 2014/1/1
Y1 - 2014/1/1
N2 - 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 timerelated 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.
AB - 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 timerelated 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.
KW - Charities
KW - Donations
KW - Email
KW - Social factors
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84898991256&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84898991256&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2531602.2531611
DO - 10.1145/2531602.2531611
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9781450325400
SP - 1297
EP - 1307
BT - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
ER -