Survey people who have donated to OAF

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Research aim: 'Describe the kinds of people who donate to the OpenAustralia Foundation and why they do it.

On Monday (2015-01-05) afternoon We run a very short survey for the 160 people who have donated to OAF. So far we've had about 30 responses from 70 email opens.

The questions are:

• Roughly, how old are you? (Under 20, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, Above 80)
• What is your occupation?
• Which OpenAustralia Foundation projects are you familiar with?
• Do you regularly donate money to organisations or projects?
• Why did you donate to the OpenAustralia Foundation?
• Would you be happy to have a brief chat to help us learn more?

I'll update this issue with some of the data returned after the responses trickle off.

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20 people so far have responded that they would be happy to do a brief interview to help us learn more.

From these 15-20 minute interviews we want to do a deep dive and learn much more about these people. These interview will give us more detailed qualitative information about our supports which will be useful for:

• designing approaches to engaging these people and others to support OAF more and in new ways;
• planning and designing ways to keep people people informed and involved with OAF's ongoing work;
• designing how OAF explains itself so citizens can better understand what it does;
• making citizen personas to judge our work against during design and development;
• and generally putting us in closer collaboration with our supporters.

There are really good tips for the type of interview we want to conduct in Erika Hall's article Interviewing Humans (this general research approach is greatly influenced by her book Just Enough Research):

The goal of interviewing users is to learn about everything that might influence how the users might use what you’re creating.

The interviews will be recorded with the persons explicit consent so that we can make notes afterward, refer back to them in the future and share them within our team. It should be a pretty free discussion with the interviewee doing almost all the talking, but there are some things we want to learn about:

Icebreakers & general information

• Ask if they are happy for the call to be recorded
• what is an average day like for them?
• how often do they use the web and email and across what devices?
• Which websites do they visit frequently?
• Are they interested in politics? What particular issues are important to them?
• Where do they go looking for information about the issues they care about?
• How did they find out about OAF?

If they say they donated primarily because they use OAF services

• do they use the project(s) as part of their work?
• are there other such services they use? Do they pay for them? How much?
• do they share their what they get from it with people at work/family etc. ?

Their relationships with organisations

• What other organisations do these people support or follow
• how they stay in touch with those organisations and learn about their projects
• Do they advocate for the causes they support to their family/friends? Where do they do this? What types of arguments would they make?

How do they perceive OAF?

• What is their mental model of OAF? How big do they think we are?
• What language do they use to describe OAF?
• if they use OAF projects in there work, in what ways/how?
• Do they have questions of feedback for OAF?

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Describe the kinds of people who donate to the OpenAustralia Foundation and why they do it.

A significant group of people who have donated to OAF are passionately interested in a topic, and use an OpenAustralia Foundation project as a tool in that area. For example, someone who is an active member of a local planning group and uses PlanningAlerts to track development applications.

These people donate because they get personal value from one OAF project and so want to support it to continue. They also generally support greater citizen access to government information.

Basic demographics

Our short survey received 38 responses from a possible 160 people who have donated to the foundation.

Over 90% of respondents were over 30 years old, with 75% being evenly distributed between 30s, 40s and 50s. These age ranges were also reflected in the responses to the PlanningAlerts survey.

This is slightly younger than people who are 'members' of Getup (from their most recent annual report).

The two most popular categories were IT/Tech related jobs and retired. There were also a number of service professionals, people working in government and at NGOs.

75% of respondents said they were familiar with PlanningAlerts, 65% OpenAustralia.org and 50% Election Leaflets. 45% were familiar with They Vote For You, 40% Right To Know and 10% Morph.io.

65% of people said they regularly donated money to organisations or projects.

We conducted roughly 20 minute interviews with 11 people who had responded. The interviews were all very positive and it was great to learn about the people who use our projects and support our aims. We spoke to people around Australia, who had very different interests. A few people even made donations to the foundation after speaking with us.

Passionate and knowledgable in their area of focus

The people that we spoke to were 'power users', or passionately interested in their chosen are of focus. For a number of people that was local planning and they were either working in this area professionally as an investor or planner, or were involved in resident planning groups.

These people are using one OpenAustralia Project as part of a wider project or campaign they were active in.

Here are some of our key observations about who these donors are:

• These donors are generally quite self directed. Many of them were self-employed, involved in community action groups, or had established independent projects of some kind.
• A number of people were involved with local community groups of some kind.
• Most people we spoke to who were using PlanningAlerts (which was most people), had acted upon information they had received in an alert by making a submission to council on it.
• People who donated made little use, if any, with more than one OAF project. They were often aware of a number of the projects, but were only an active user of one project. 10 of 38 responders only selected one project to the question "Which OpenAustralia Foundation projects are you familiar with?".
• Most people we spoke to had discovered there first OAF project by being directly introduced to it, often by someone from OAF, rather than finding it through google or social media.
• Everyone we spoke to had found the OpenAustralia Foundation through one of the projects, not the other way round.
• Everyone we spoke to was computer and web savvy, a number of them having experience with programming or data management.

People donated because they use the projects and support OAF’s broad work towards better access to civic information.

In the survey there were two very clear themes in the responses to the question "Why did you donate to the OpenAustralia Foundation?"

• Because they support the values of the OpenAustralia Foundation
• Because they get value from an OAF project and want it to continue

"I believe in freedom of information, open and transparent government, open data"

The majority of people mentioned their support for the general mission of the OpenAustralia Foundation to create better access to civic information.

Some examples:

Because I believe in Open Australia and the ideals therein

I believe public, open access to parliamentary records is important, and that politicians need to be held to greater account. They Vote For You is a step in the right direction to holding politicians accountable.

Believe in freedom of information, open and transparent government, open data - that governments should be more transparent, should publish the information they produce - briefings, data, revenue and expenditure detail - as a matter of course, without the need for FOI requests from the public or journalists. Also believe we need to know more about our politicians, political parties and our political system - who funds their campaigns, who they meet with (not just formal lobbyists, bust also businesspeople and others who have other interests), what do politicians stand for, what is their vision for the future, what are their voting records like, how do their voting records compare to their election commitments, etc.

I like what you do and work that opens up closed processes to scrutiny.

I beleive in your open data/technology agenda whole heartedly. Democracy is a closed broken old boys club and needs to be re-designed and re-built.

"Because it provides a service I use !"

Many people also said they donated because they were getting value from one of the projects and wanted to support it.

Some examples:

Because of the free service offered and that donations are what keeps companies like this going.

As a small thank you for the emails (about my MP's speeches in Parliament) that you make it possible for me to receive without having to read/search all of Hansard!

I use PlanningAlerts service and I value it. I also highly regard OpenAustralia Foundation and the sense of transparency and freedom it brings into the society

Donated to help fund a scraper for Waverley Council (NSW) planning alerts.

As part of my volunteer work, I am involved in planning outcomes in residential areas. Planning alerts has done just that for me informing me of new applications on occasions across the past year or so.

I use the services and feel it's a good service that make ppl in the area aware of what is happening especially housing development around them.

Because it does provide a useful service, making me aware of up coming proposed planning applications in my immediate neighborhood that I might otherwise have not been aware of. Due to this early notification I have had some success with council and even VCAT in influencing the resulting plans to maintain respectful scale and privacy within my immediate neighborhood. i use it

I have found the service interesting and am aware that it costs money to run

It's a great, free service, that deserves my support

People don't need to know much about OAF to donate to it, but appreciate a clear explanation when they ask

• A slight majority of people that we spoke to knew very little about the OpenAustralia Foundation. Those who did know about the foundation had an accurate picture of our size and structure. No-one thought the OpenAustralia Foundation was a large, well funded institution.
• A number of people who had donated also donated to other non-profit websites, Wikipedia, Getup, Mozzila and Black Box Voting were mentioned.
• There were quite a few questions about how OAF is funded, and a majority of people mentioned that they were concerned by the amount of money NFPs put into marketing rather than their core mission. They appreciated it when they received a clear answer from the NGO they were questioning.

People like to receive updates but appreciate brevity

• Donors were generally positive about receiving regular updates from the organisations or campaigns they supported. There were strong bad reactions to being signed up to campaigns they did not support.
• People who do receive emails liked concise messages that were quick to read and scan.
• A few people mentioned that the email newsletters they appreciated gave them some actionable information: TV shows to note down to watch or facts about the issues they were interested in to argue with friends about.