The “Bullseye Gives” $3M Challenge proves to be challenging

May 22, 2009 by Robert.

 I’ve been tracking the dollars in the $3 million give-away and thought I’d share an interesting graph.  It tells a story about the organizations involved… but perhaps you see it differently?

 Here’s what I did.  Each time I voted at Target’s Facebook profile, the site replied with a tally of the current stats.  The first couple of days I didn’t bother to grab the numbers.  But after a while (as is my custom) I started to get curious about how the numbers are changing over time, and what it might mean.  So I started to collect samples.

 Now, these are not scientific samples — the samples are not evenly-spaced.  That is, they were taken at different times of the day, sometimes with a day-and-a-half inbetween.

 FYI, the sampling interval is roughly between 24 and 30 hours.The above Fig. 1 shows a sample of performance data from the Target Bullseye Gives Challenge on Facebook, in which Target is splitting $3 million between 10 organizations.

 Sample 1 was taken at about the 4th day of the challenge (40K+ votes).  Box 1 suggests that even after 40K votes, the Red Cross shared climbed steeply for 2-3 days while all other organizations declined in %-share.  Box 2 shows that St. Jude CRH surged back to regain the largest share of votes. The number of total daily votes at Sample 1 was about 10K, and it has increased to about 20K per day.

 The chart clearly shows that 2 of the organizations stand out from all the rest.

  The top 2, St. Jude and Red Cross, have demonstrated the ability to rally Facebook voters.  There are interesting implications, and it would be very telling to map spikes in actual votes against campaign pushes (emails, ads, etc.).  Hopefully, Target or Facebook will release the statistics.

 Without the details, some assumptions must be made.  We may assume, for example, that some people are “one-time-voters” and other people continue to vote every day, at every opportunity.  Since we don’t know exactly how that plays-out, we can assume that the ratio/trend is constant across all organizations.  But it would be interesting to know.

 Is the daily increase in votes due to a growing base of “repeat” voters, or lots of “one-time” voters?

 In boxes 1 & 2 above, the slope of the lines indicates that one of the top 2 organizations was adding new votes very quickly during those periods.  The other organizations show a gradual decline, suggesting that most organizations are “holding steady” while the organizations with a larger voting base are taking a bigger and bigger share.

 Implications for Operation Gratitude At this point, with the gap in total votes so wide (and widening), it would take a SIGNIFICANT boost in daily votes for OpGrat to make much of a dent in the final “% share” of total votes.  For example, at the current pace, OpGrat will end-up with about 7.1% of the total ($214K).  (The top 2 are on pace to capture more than 26% each.)

 If OpGrat were to add 10,000 new votes over the Memorial Day weekend (all other trends holding steady), it would increase OpGrat’s share to roughly 7.8% ($297K).  At that rate, each new vote is worth approximately $8!

Posted in finance, military, social ventures, Linkedin, nonprofit, CSR, philanthropy, marketing | No Comments »