#4 Correlation: Fundraising vs hair-raising

With the year’s most pointless holiday (for the over 10’s demographic anyway) upon us once again. we’re dredging up some more tenuous associations from Google Trends that look at meaningless correlations in the fundraising sector for the fourth installment of Correlation Corner.

It turns out there aren’t too many Halloween-associated keywords that show much correlation with fundraising, but we finally found one in ‘hair-raising’. 

Red: Fundraising
Blue: Hair-raising 

You won’t be surprised to see that ‘hair-raising’ hits its peak of popularity right at the end of October, and then drops off a cliff as a search term. 

Fundraising follows shortly after, reaching the Christmas low and January high discussed in previous posts.

After this, there’s little correlation until the start of July, when both terms become inversely correlated for the first week of the month. 

It’s worth noting that this graph is only true of the last 12 months, and the only thing of note (according to Wikipedia) that happened during that week is that North Korea successfully tested its first intercontinental ballistic missile. 

If anything, we would have thought that people would be frantically searching for how to give to CND, but it’s a hair-raising situation, so clearly, the latter won out as a search term. 

There’s another slight inverse correlation, with fundraising showing a spike in conjunction with minor a drop in hair-raising that coincides with the total solar eclipse, just a coincidence? Absolutely. 

Stay tuned for the next installment of Correlation Corner.