Having stumbled here via the blog posts from the 2017 survey’s donation statistics, I have a request for the upcoming 2018 donation statistics: would it be possible to make a diagram and/or table showing the distribution of donations by their amount?
To clarify, I would be interested in answering questions like: “What percentage of the total amount donated in [year] were made through individual annual donations above 100$? Above 500$? Above 1,000$?” … and so on.
Graphically, this could take the form of a cumulative donation curve, with the % of the total amount donated on the y-axis and the individual donation amounts on the x-axis, sorted from smallest to largest (left to right).
Depending on how it turned out, this could (charitably interpreted):
(a) provide “smaller” donors with encouragement about how important all of their individual contributions are, despite their apparent individual insignificance, or
(b) provide the EA community with confirmation of just how much impact a tiny number of individual large donors can have, any why it’s so important to continue to actively enlist their financial support.
I was inspired to comment by looking into the two most recent AMF financial reports (https://www.againstmalaria.com/FinancialInformation.aspx) and discovering that despite the highest ~4 donations being 15.1 million $, and 3 times ~ 1 million $, the remainder of the donations still made up 45 to 65% of the total donations. But then I wanted to know what the distribution below 1 million $ looked like, since e.g. 500,000$ is still quite a large amount of money that very few people are able to donate.
I’d be happy to take the lead on this using Excel, once the link to the data is restored. In case this could in your view lead to undesirable unintended consequences, how and whether to display this information at all could still be discussed and decided by you guys.
Thanks so much for all your efforts!
Sounds great, thanks!