St. Jude is a non-profit Children’s medical research hospital that focuses on finding cures and a means of prevention for cancer affecting children. St. Jude makes medical care accessible for any family in need by covering all cost associated with treatment and recovery. The majority of funding comes from individual contributions and donors, so fundraising, in particular, is essential for St. Jude’s success. Despite the importance of fundraising for the hospital, St. Jude’s social media posts receive among the lowest amount of engagement when compared to their other posts. Engagement, as measured for this analysis, includes total retweets, total replies, and total mentions.
After exploring over 500 posts from St. Jude’s Twitter account the tweets were defined and put into categories consisting of content type, type of engagement, type of hashtag, domain type and type of media. This revealed the most engagement occurred among tweets about current events and holidays. When comparing actual conversation around top fundraising tweets and top current event and holiday tweets, the gap in engagement becomes clear.
Holiday and current event posts from St. Jude usually have positive messages that garner positive replies, mentions, and retweets. Fundraising posts do not receive the same amount of positive sentiment because regardless of the cause, some people resent over-communication and being asked repeatedly for money.
Happy Easter from Shekinah and the kids of St. Jude! pic.twitter.com/rsNRLWnpjj
— St. Jude (@StJude) April 1, 2018
The tweet above is an example of St. Jude’s holiday and current events post. This post is celebratory and as evident, fostered more engagement, specifically positive engagement, than other categories.
Because of friends like you, families, like Joanna's, never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food – because all a family should worry about is helping their child live.
— St. Jude (@StJude) June 20, 2018
The tweet above is an example of one of St. Jude’s fundraising post. This post as you can see, received less overall engagement than the event/holiday tweet. There were multiple complaints in the replies and negative responses.
This post was constructed by ADPR 5750 students Allison Smith, Mary Gardner Coffee, and Brooke Hamil.
