E-mail choice and social responsibility

A recent post on Tech Scoop shows that rates of social involvement when it comes to giving donations. Check out these charts:

Number of Transactions by e-mail provider

Number of Transactions by e-mail provider

From the stats, mac users are the most active when it comes to being involved with giving donations. While they are active at giving, these active hip young users are out given when it comes to amount by the savvy trendsetters using Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail for their e-mail services.

Amount of donations by users of specific e-mail providers

Amount of donations by users of specific e-mail providers

What’s this say about e-mail providers, users, and social responsibility? Among many things, it would seem that these leading e-mail providers have connected with a demographic that not only says they want to be involved and responsible, but actually do! I’m curious about the age range of these user groups and if this would indicate anything about a younger generation starting to be more active in giving even though the amounts may be small. A grass roots development in people connecting with causes could lead to marketing plans and campaigns based not only on ages, location, etc., but on e-mail providers.

What are some other ways we could use this info to focus on those who actually do take action?

3 thoughts on “E-mail choice and social responsibility

  1. Michael,
    wow… this is pretty fascinating stuff… If i had a budget for advertising right now, it might be worth an “experiment” to see how it pans out…Also interesting to see that the reliable free e-mail services are used by people who provide the most giving. Could we conclude from this that people are more benevolent when they have better control over their finances, or would that be a stretch?
    Geoff

  2. It could be that those who have better control of their finances are more benevolent, or that those who use the free e-mail services are more connected. That connectedness could make them more aware of both needs and ways they can participate in responding to those needs. Do others not respond to needs because of lack of resources or lack of know-how?

  3. There is also the possibility that people only give out their “free” accounts to people taking donations. I know I have a .mac and a gmail account. If I give money online, I’m more likely to use my gmail account instead of my .mac account because gmail is more of a throwaway account for me.

    Of course there could be a number of other reasons as well. I think Google employees are known for very high giving rates so that might be skewing things as well.

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