Donation ($) | Meals |
---|---|
40 | 2 |
60 | 5 |
144 | 33 |
360 | 180 |
This seems strangely non-linear, which suggests something
interesting, namely, that the fraction of your pledge that
KQED uses to pay for thank you gifts as opposed to using to
fund their operations. There's way too few points here to do
a proper fit but I can't help myself. Playing around with
curves a bit, a quadratic seems to fit pretty well,
with parameters: Meals = .0014 * Donation^2 + 1.2.
It's not just the
$360 data point that throws it out of whack, either.
There's apparent nonlinearity, even in the first three points.
(Again, don't get on me about overfitting: with only four
points there's only so much you can do.)
I'm not sure what this suggests about their business model. Naively,
I would have expected the fraction of your donation that goes to
gifts to go down as your gift went up. Indeed, you might
have thought that they would take a small loss on the smallest
pledges just to get people involved and then move to the upsell
at some later date.
Thinking about it some more, I guess the natural model is that
KQED as trying to extract money from you up to the point where
the marginal dollar they extract from you costs them a marginal
dollar in gifts (or in this case food bank donations)
at which point they stop. So, as people's marginal
utility of having given something, anything, to KQED declines, they need to
keep jacking up gift quality faster than the size of the donation
to keep extracting your cash. Other theories are of course welcome.