Sweet Land of Liberty

I've been doing some data cleaning today as part of my work for Cavernoma Alliance UK. The thing in my head which bled in 2002 is a cavernoma so this charity is close to my heart and so I created and now manage their web sites.

One of the key things the public facing web site does is gets new members to join. They do so via this web form.

As we're a UK based charity and health related issues are something which are best considered on a country by country basis the form doesn't include a field for "Country" as we didn't really expect non-UK visitors to want to become members of our charity.

We were wrong, they did.

The countries we see most overseas members from are the US and Ireland but they come from all over the world including places like India, Canada, the Antipodes, and all over Europe.

Historically they've done the best they can with the form. If their country uses postal or ZIP codes they put that in the "Postal code" and then they put the rest of their address in "Postal Address", including their country.

Recently we've imported their data into an InfoStorm database to make it easier to manage and to better communicate with them. So today as part of that process I was cleaning up the data and, having added a "Country" field (which I will also be adding to that form shortly), I was working my way through updating the non-UK residents with their correct country based on their address and/or phone number. While doing this I discovered there is one country, and only one country, where the residents generally don't bother to enter their country on that form.

Who is it? I suspect you won't be surprised to discover it's the United States of America: 85% of them had just entered their city and state code and left us to deduce they're American.

Americans make up about 25% of the non-UK members, but of the other 75% every single one entered their country on the form.

I'm not sure exactly what this tells us about the average American's view, both of the world and the Web ...