(1) The number of donors per charity was included and even broken down by referral type, but the total amount of money moved per charity was not (I believe) disclosed. I’m wondering if this is data you intentionally left out of the analysis (for privacy reasons) or just happened not to include. I would be interested in that data since it can help convey the seriousness of donations. If privacy considerations are an issue, you might wish to disclose the number only for the charities that got at least ten donors.
(2) Somewhat related to Dan Keys’ point: the feedback time between the year of donations (2014) and the time the results are released (July 2016) is larger than ideal. You mentioned that the reason for having to do it this way was that the survey was conducted prior to the end of 2015. I’m wondering if it might make more sense to conduct the survey around the end of January, and then have the results released a little before the Giving Season of the next year. Is this something you’ve considered, and/or are there other ways you expect the feedback loop to be shorter in subsequent years?
(1) We didn’t ask people how much money they donated to individual charities, that’s right. The data is available in the github repository for the project—search for ‘github’ in the report
(2) I agree that conducting the survey at the start of the calendar year would be better. Whether we would do that depends to some extent on whether we’d want to wait six months until we start the next survey. We are tightening up the feedback loop—we’re improving the code used to analyse it every time. This year the survey was handed around quite a few people - we hope next year to have a dedicated person who can focus entirely full-time on it.
Thanks! On point (1), I downloaded the raw data shortly after posting the comment and realized that the existence of people who have donated to multiple charities makes the analysis difficult. Apologies for not doing that before posting the comment.
I have two questions.
(1) The number of donors per charity was included and even broken down by referral type, but the total amount of money moved per charity was not (I believe) disclosed. I’m wondering if this is data you intentionally left out of the analysis (for privacy reasons) or just happened not to include. I would be interested in that data since it can help convey the seriousness of donations. If privacy considerations are an issue, you might wish to disclose the number only for the charities that got at least ten donors.
(2) Somewhat related to Dan Keys’ point: the feedback time between the year of donations (2014) and the time the results are released (July 2016) is larger than ideal. You mentioned that the reason for having to do it this way was that the survey was conducted prior to the end of 2015. I’m wondering if it might make more sense to conduct the survey around the end of January, and then have the results released a little before the Giving Season of the next year. Is this something you’ve considered, and/or are there other ways you expect the feedback loop to be shorter in subsequent years?
(1) We didn’t ask people how much money they donated to individual charities, that’s right. The data is available in the github repository for the project—search for ‘github’ in the report
(2) I agree that conducting the survey at the start of the calendar year would be better. Whether we would do that depends to some extent on whether we’d want to wait six months until we start the next survey. We are tightening up the feedback loop—we’re improving the code used to analyse it every time. This year the survey was handed around quite a few people - we hope next year to have a dedicated person who can focus entirely full-time on it.
Thanks! On point (1), I downloaded the raw data shortly after posting the comment and realized that the existence of people who have donated to multiple charities makes the analysis difficult. Apologies for not doing that before posting the comment.
If you waited until Jan 2017, would you ask about both 2015 and 2016 donations?