What Did People Talk About on GivingTuesday 2022?

What Did People Talk About on GivingTuesday 2022?

  • Charity
Sal Morton 

25th May 2023

 

Generosity is on people’s minds more than ever. As the world faces multiple global crises, the conversation around generosity has become louder, more impactful, and more vital than ever before. Understanding how people connect with generosity online can provide invaluable insights into the areas and actions that are most meaningful to them, and the key to unlocking the immense power of generosity.

Pulsar has paired up with global generosity movement GivingTuesday to collaborate on getting to the bottom of the ways people relate to giving. Giving Tuesday falls on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, using the hashtag #GivingTuesday to encourage generosity all around the world. Founded in 2012, there are now official Giving Tuesday movements in over 60 countries.

Our partnership included Pulsar collaborating on a live dashboard hosted on GivingTuesday’s homepage which provided hourly updates on the keywords, hashtags, causes and types of appeal mentioned in conjunction with the #GivingTuesday hashtag. We further collaborated on a webinar, where Kathleen Murphy of GivingTuesday took us through the ins-and-outs of GivingTuesday's approach, whilst also looking at a preview of this data set. Watch this webinar here.

Here we take a look at the wider data surrounding Giving Tuesday year on year and take a deep dive into how online audiences are talking about generosity.

While 2021 saw Science & Education the top cause, 2022 sees attention turn to Health & Healthcare, along with Children & Elderly and Animal Welfare. Inside these cause-based conversations, we see the topic turn frequently to donation requests, events and personal stories from those affected by the cause.

Though previous years have seen Empowerment increasingly become the most important CTA, Giving Tuesday 2022 sees a bigger emphasis on Urgency. Looking at posts using Urgency, as well as seeing posts asking for urgent monetary donations, we see that a lot of posts are asking for urgent non-financial support. This shows that the GivingTuesday audience find direct, non-monetary ways of giving being a useful aid and often a time-sensitive lifeline.

When taking a closer look at how different Calls to Action relate to different causes, it becomes apparent that there are a few trends. One of the most notable is that no single cause tends to use only one method. Rather, charities and individuals aligned with a particular cause tend to employ a range of different language types. 

We also see correlations such as Animal Welfare utilising Urgency, plus Children & Elderly appealing to a sense of Duty. This begins to examine the distinct ways of talking about GivingTuesday among different audiences.

But who are the conversation leaders in the GivingTuesday conversation, exactly?

Just over three quarters of this group are from the US, with 5% being from Washington DC. Aside from Giving Tuesday accounts, these posters tend to follow accounts like the WHO and NPR, as well as news accounts and politicians from across the political spectrum.

US Sportsfans came into their own during the World Cup 2022 in Qatar where they used #USAvIRN in their Giving Tuesday conversation, coupling the major sports event with calls for generosity. 

Equality & Justice Activists called for mutual aid as well as donations, plus asks for allyship for oppressed communities. They also were the most popular meme-posters, which gained virality and spread Giving Tuesday outside of its usual audience.

Educators & Teachers mobilized communities such as #TeacherTwitter to call for people to buy struggling classrooms supplies through DonorsChoose or Amazon wishlists, showing an alternative way of helping compared to traditional charity donations.

When we look at hashtags, we note the prevalence of animal-based hashtags such as #dogs and #adoptdontshop, though we also see another type of animal-based hashtag: #babydogecoin and #savingdoges. This is related to Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency whose community has had a smaller but increasing voice in the GivingTuesday movement, along with other crypto communities. 

As we can see below, other than ‘giving’ and ‘Tuesday’, the most mentioned keyword in relation to #GivingTuesday is ‘help’, coming in above even ‘donation’ and ‘donate’. This is interesting to relate to the prevalence and recent rise of the CTA ‘Urgency’. Both ‘help’ and Urgency are aiming to increase the speed with which causes are helped and solutions are found.

Also worth mentioning is the highest-mentioned keyword that isn’t directly related to the day itself or donations: the 13th-most-mentioned keyword, ‘consider’. Audiences asking others to ‘consider’ shows GivingTuesday’s underlying message - to not only spread awareness and ask for help on this dedicated day, but to change one’s relationship with generosity and ‘consider’ other ways of being in our communities.

When it comes to supporting charitable causes, giving money isn't the only option when being generous. Online conversation is showing that Fundraising and Volunteering are becoming increasingly popular ways to get involved and give back. 

When we examine this alongside 2021, we see that donating items and clothing has become a more popular way to give non-monetary support. Audiences are increasingly finding that there are many different ways to make a difference, with more people finding unique ways to get involved and support the causes they care about.

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This article was created using data from TRAC

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