How frequently do women donate to certain cause categories, like Animal Welfare or Arts & culture, compared to men? Do these categories, in turn, tend to attract more one-off, or more recurring donations? What cause categories are more popular among male donors, in terms of total $ amounts donated?
Using 15 years (and almost $100 million!) worth of donation data, this tool answers the aformentioned questions & more.
Each bubble represents a cause category. Hover over a bubble (or tap on mobile) to view the category name and corresponding preferences. Gender preferences are visualised along the x-axis and determine the horizontal coordinates of the bubble. Preferences for one-off (single) or recurring (periodically repeated) donations determine the vertical coordinates.
Use the buttons at the top of the chart to toggle between visualising preferences in terms of the number of donations, or preferences in terms of the total amount donated. The number of donations or total amount donated also determine the size of the bubbles.
If you resize your browser window, refresh the page to resize the chart accordingly.
For more details, refer to the accompanying article here.
The data includes all one-off and recurring donations made through GiveNow, up to August 2016, excluding the categories "Sport & Recreation" and "Emergency & Safety." These categories are outliers (meaning that the corresponding bubbles would fall outside the chart) and listed in the table below instead:
| Cause | Data (by number of donations) | Data (by totaly amount donated) |
|---|---|---|
| Sport & Recreation | Men donated 1.7x more frequently to Sport & Recreation causes than women. Sport & Recreation causes received 71.4x more one-off donations than recurring donations. In total, Sport & Recreation causes received 1,795 donations. | Men donated 3.1x more in total ($) to Sport & Recreation causes than women. Sport & Recreation causes received 250.0x more income from one-off donations than recurring donations. In total, Sport & Recreation causes received $227,121. |
| Emergency & Safety | Women and men were roughly equally likely to donate to Emergency & Safety causes. Emergency & Safety causes received 25.0x more one-off donations than recurring donations. In total, Emergency & Safety causes received 18,057 donations. | Men donated 1.3x more in total ($) to Emergency & Safety causes than women. Emergency & Safety causes received 76.9x more income from one-off donations than recurring donations. In total, Emergency & Safety causes received $3,460,254. |
Prior to August 2016, GiveNow did not have the option to select a non-binary gender, hence the chart only includes a male versus female comparison. Since then, GiveNow has added the option to select "Mx," but insufficient data has been collected to include non-binary gender preferences. We hope to revisit this analysis in the future to include non-binary gender preferences, as well.
Want to learn more? Download the full GiveNow study here: https://www.givenow.com.au/stats.
Questions? Comments? Contact: service@ourcommunity.com.au, marking the subject line: "GiveNow donor preferences chart".
Chart design was inspired by The Words Men and Women Use When They Write About Love (NY Times, 7 Nov 2017).
Joost van der Linden, Data Scientist at Our Community (released June 2019). To learn more about our other work, check out the latest Innovation Lab news.
