Spam E-mail

According to a survey conducted in February of 2004 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the CAN-SPAM act has not helped most e-mail users thus far. The first legislation of its kind, the CAN-SPAM Act became effective at the beginning of this year and aims to regulate spam (rather than stop it.)

Seven in ten of those who use e-mail (70%) said that the presence of spam made being online unpleasant and annoying. Yet, just four in ten e-mail users (42%) said they were even aware that anti-spam legislation had gone into effect.

Furthermore, the majority of e-mail users feel this legislation has not improved the situation, but rather, levels of “annoyance” have increased since the beginning of this year.
Additional findings from the study include:

Young people are more tolerant of spam.
Women generally tend to be more bothered by it.
E-mail users are developing defense mechanisms against spam.
Spam’s burden is heavier on personal e-mail accounts than on work e-mail accounts.
Seventy-six percent of respondents consider unsolicited e-mail containing religious or political information to be spam.
Thirty-two percent consider unsolicited commercial e-mail to be spam, even if it came from a sender with whom they have done business with in the past.

These findings suggest that donors would prefer to retain more control of their e-mail inboxes. This news could have broad impact on organizations that seek to develop donor-led strategies toward the use of e-mail.

Older Americans and the Internet

Recent studies conducted by Campbell Rinker representing more than 10,000 respondents show that the median age of donors is 57, well above the national median age of 35. Depending on the charitable sector, median donor age varies from 49 to 64 years.

About six out of ten Americans (58%) ages 50 to 64 use the Internet. Slightly more than one in five people over the age of 65, or about eight million users, hop online. This is a weighty 47% increase over the number of seniors who indicated they went online in 2000. Some key facts regarding Internet use among older Americans include the following:

Female seniors are just as likely as male seniors to be online. Online seniors also tend to be white, highly educated, and live in households with higher median incomes.
Seniors who are offline tend to view using the Internet as an activity that has little value. However, once seniors get online, they are just as enthusiastic as younger users. They are just as likely as younger users to go online on a typical day.
Communication and information searches attract online seniors. There has been sharp growth in the number of older Americans doing key Internet activities such as health searches, e-shopping, and online banking.
Almost six in ten (58%) of those ages 50 to 64 use the Internet. As Internet users in their 50’s get older, they will transform the online senior stereotype.
Go here for additional statistics on this key segment.

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DonorSpeakT is a free publication of Campbell Rinker, a market research firm dedicated to helping organizations obtain accurate feedback from their constituents through surveys, focus groups, personal interviews, donor file analysis and advanced statistical modeling.