Yogscast Jingle Jam Donation Analysis

In recent times, online streaming has become one of the main forms of entertainment source for people of all ages online. As such, it has also become a great vehicle to fundraise for numerous charity organizations as views enjoy their favorite streamer while giving to a meaningful cause.

The Yogscast Jingle Jam is one of the largest annual charity gaming events, where viewers can donate and receive game bundles of more than 40 games at a huge discount. All proceeds went towards benefiting multiple charities.

The Christmas Livestreams, currently known as the The Jingle Jam, are a series of livestreams that are shown over the course of December each year with the intention to raise money for various charities. A total of $20,508,000+ has been donated to charity over the course of all the livestreams. — Yogscast Wiki

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has impacted people’s livelihood but it has also shifted people’s leisure time to mainly indoor activities, meaning more disposable income to spend on online entertainment. So it would be interesting to take a look at how the Yogscast Jingle Jam is impacted by the recent events.

Let’s take a look at the 2018–2020 data to see how they compare against each other in terms of charitable giving. (Note: Jingle Jame 2020 was shortened just the first 14 days of December unlike the previous years which lasted the entire month of December due to the pandemic).

For the last 3 years, the total amount raised has been consistently around $2–3 million dollars. Interestingly, the accumulative total follows roughly a logarithmic trend. The tail-end behavior of 2020 seems to an abnormality due to the 14-day cutoff given the circumstances, likely to be a last-minute push to match the previous totals despite the short timeframe.

The graph on the donation counts seems to confirm this theory on 2020’s tail-end behavior, where the instances of donations beat the previous year’s amount by a significant margin. But what about the average donation amount?

For reference, each year’s bundles vary in the amount that people must donate to receive.

• 2018: 78 games, $35
• 2019: 67 games, $30
• 2020: 41 games, $33

As you can see, despite the price of the bundle staying approximately the same, the average donation amount has been consistently above the bundle cost, especially in 2020!

Let’s take a closer look at each of the years.

Here we can see each of the year’s average donation surplus (donation amount — bundle cost), with a horizontal line marking the average surplus for the year.

We can see that as each year pass, the amount of the surplus increased, with a surprise jump from the $2–3 surplus to >$5 surplus! Looks like people grew to recognize online charity events as a way of giving back, especially in 2020 where numerous charities are needing more support than ever.

Lastly, let’s take a look at the variation in the donation amount across the years.

Once again, some similar patterns over the years. The start of the event has numerous high donation outliers and the spread slowly tightens as the event goes on. Interestingly, the 2020 data displays consistently more outliers relative to the previous years, which may be attributed to the pandemic-specific circumstances of the donors and/or the shorten 14-day timeframe giving more urgency to match the previous year’s record.

Conclusion

With this quick analysis of the past 3 years of donation behaviors, we can see that people are heavily impacted by the pandemic, but to our surprise still managed to beat 2019’s total. Despite the current circumstances seem to suggest that people would decrease their charitable giving, the 2020 event was able to achieve $2.8 million in just 14 days.

Hopefully, as society shifts back to normalcy, people will continue to give back via events such as the Jingle Jam.

Credits:

Dataset: Yogscast Jingle Jam Donation Tracker & Data Sets by No1mann

About:

Zhixin (Robin) Zhang is a senior in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania studying CIS and OIDD. This data project was conducted for Professor Prasanna Tambe’s course, OIDD245: Analytics & The Digital Economy.