Donation Cascades in Facebook
Recently, Facebook added a box at the top of users’ newsfeed homepage to encourage them to donate to Ebola relief efforts. It’ll stay up on the site for about a week (or until the user dismisses the box), and includes buttons to ‘Learn More’ or ‘Donate Now’, the latter of which allows a user to select one of three charities to donate to.
With the Ebola outbreak already so widely known, how beneficial is the addition of this box?
A Quartz article by Adam Epstein examines the addition of the box as well as hypothesizes why it’s needed in the first place. Interestingly, people have donated considerably less money to Ebola relief than to disaster relief in the past, despite similar death tolls. Last year, typhoon Haiyan killed 6340 people, and the Red Cross received $87 million in donations almost immediately. To date, the 2014 Ebola outbreak has killed almost 5000 people (more are anticipated), and an additional 8000 are infected. The Red Cross has only received $3.7 million in donations – a small fraction of the relative donations of typhoon Haiyan in 2013, despite similar mortality.
This phenomenon shows that peoples’ decision to donate to a cause does not explicitly depend on death toll (although it may be correlated), or surprisingly, locality. Typhoon Haiyan posed no threat to most donators (who were in the US or Europe), but Ebola cases have happened and continue to somewhat threaten the areas in which many donators live in.
The article suggests a different reason why people aren’t donating to Ebola relief. While the mortality for natural disasters and disease outbreaks are similar, the timeframe in which they happen is the key difference. Typhoon Haiyan killed thousands in a few days, whereas Ebola killed thousands over several months. As a result, the jolt people feel to rally around a singular ‘enemy’ (disastrous event) is severely dulled in the case of the Ebola outbreak, which unfortunately translates into much fewer donations. Additionally, people donate when they see others donate – both cases are self-fulfilling prophecies.
This behavior is analogous to an information cascade. People are more likely to donate if they see others donating. In typhoon Haiyan’s case, several people decided to donate due to the powerful initial scope of the disaster. This resonates through these initial donators’ personal networks, heavily and implicitly encouraging their friends to donate as well. Essentially, we can model the decision to donate as an ‘Accept’ or ‘Reject’ decision, with the signal and state being a mixture of the personal impact of the event, as well as the actions of people around you.
In the Ebola outbreak, the graduality of mortality leads to few initial donators. Others see that their friends are not donating, and combined with the fact that the outbreak is killing people relatively slowly, decide not to donate. While some small subsets of networks may choose to donate, cascading the information that one’s friends are not interested in donating is often enough to influence one’s own decision.
Facebook is trying to change that. Mark Zuckerberg himself is trying to ‘kickstart’ a cascade with a recent $25 million donation. The power of his donation is not just $25 million – it also encompasses the donations other people will make due to the influence of his donation. With this and the addition of the donation box prompt on the Facebook homepage, the idea of donation will be accessible to Facebook’s 1.3 billion users. Obviously, not all of them will choose to donate despite the efforts of Zuckerberg and Facebook, but the hope is that many will, leading to many donation cascades within the personal networks of Facebook users.
Subduing the Ebola outbreak will require funds for an additional 5000 specialized health workers. Thanks to networks and information cascades, this little box at the top of Facebook’s homepage might just make that happen.
Epstein, Adam. ‘Facebook now has a donate button for Ebola’. 6 November 2014. http://qz.com/292436/facebook-now-has-a-donate-button-for-ebola/