2022 Report of the Ratsadonprasong Fund, Part 4: Donation Breakdown by Category

Graphic design by zerotwostudio

At first I thought there’d be bigger donors / Means that donors are ordinary people like you and me / A Fund of the People indeed.
A Twitter user reflected after we published Part 2: Top Donors of our 2022 Annual Report.

With Part 4, we are delving more deeply into the significance of smaller donors, as in those who contributed under 1,000 baht. Smaller contributions, we found, add up to about the same level as bigger contributions over 1,000 baht.

Donation methods may be categorized into:

In-Person Deposits, which include cash deposits with the bank teller, money transfer at the bank, or putting cash or a check in the literal hands of a caretaker of the fund
Cash Deposit Machines
ATM Transfers
Internet/Mobile Transfers, which are separate from
QR Code Payments into the fund’s account

On the first image, note that the more “modern” the donation method, the lower the averaged donation in that category. And yet, the high traffic of online donations—the two lowest averaged categories—dwarfs other categories in total amount: online donations add up to 94 percent of the money. The sheer number of the number “112” (see Part 3) also resulted in it being the median for both categories and for all donations in general. See pie chart and table in the lower half.

On the second image, the bar graph on the top shows that 3-digit donations are the most common, followed by 2-digit and 4-digit donations. The pie chart on the bottom shows that the total amount in baht of 4-digit donations ranks highest (1,573,455.72 baht), followed by that of 3-digit donations (1,300,836.14 baht) and then, far behind, that of 5-digit donations (537,083.16 baht). In short, the total amount of 3-digit donations trumps that of 5-digit donations, and is rather neck and neck with that of 4-digit donations.

See the third image for an even clearer picture of the power of small donations. The bar graph on the top shows that over 60% of 3-digit donations come from the 100-199 baht range, followed by 200-299 baht and 500-599 baht ranges, each accounting for ten-something percent. The pie chart on the bottom shows that total donations in the 500-599 baht range are only a little bit higher than those in the 100-199 baht range. In short, small donations do become big donations by the power of multiplication.