The Use of Web Scraping to Explain Donation Behavior

The number of natural disasters has been rising for several years. The resulting damage is immense, with developing countries being hit the hardest. In order to support reconstruction, affected countries depend on donations, whose collection and re-distribution is usually coordinated by NGOs. For them to be able to collect donations in a more targeted manner, they require, among others, a better understanding of the effects different types of media have on the donation process and respective donation success. Aiming to address a part of this need, the work presented in this article examines the relationship between media exposure and donor behavior. Our goal is to investigate the extent to which media presence affects the number of donations. The paper discusses the first step in this journey, reporting on the challenges we faced when using the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal as a test-bed to automatically collect media coverage from various sources.