A nonprofit organization ran a fundraiser and would like to determine the amount of a typical donation. Which statistic is less affected by outliers and skewed data and should be used to determine the amount of a typical donation?

The mean, or average, is calculated by summing all values and dividing by the total number of values. This statistic is highly sensitive to outliers; a few extraordinarily high or low donations can significantly distort the mean, leading to an unreliable representation of a typical donation amount.

A z-score indicates how many standard deviations a particular value is from the mean. While useful for identifying outliers, it does not provide a measure of central tendency. Therefore, it does not help in determining a typical donation amount, as it focuses on individual data points rather than summarizing the data set.

The mode is the most frequently occurring value in a data set. While it provides insight into the most common donation amount, it can be misleading when donations are varied or when there are multiple modes. Thus, it does not effectively capture the central tendency in the presence of skewed distributions or outliers.