Giving Tuesday 2018 - a review in twitter data

​​Have you heard about Giving Tuesday? Giving Tuesday is the equivalent to Black Friday and Cyber Monday – but for charitable donations. It was started in 2012 during the American Christmas and holiday season. Thanksgiving is traditionally the fourth Thursday in November, so Giving Tuesday is four days after, i.e. in late November or early December. This year, Giving Tuesday was November 27th, 2018. Having started some years ago, not only the amount of funds collected in the US has continuously risen but also the popularity and perceived relevance of Giving Tuesday for fundraising organizations all over the world. So, is Giving Tuesday a global movement already? We decided to investigate this by analysing Twitter data using the statistical software R.

Obtaining data from Twitter
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To scrape data from Twitter, one has to apply for a Twitter developer account since July 2018 and create a Twitter app which has to be approved by the platform. You of course also need a Twitter account for that. We went through this quite simple process in which certain information on one’s plans have to be provided.
We used the package rtweet to set up the connection from R to Twitter. After having successfully registered a Twitter app, it is recommendable to embed the necessary credentials (Consumer Key, Consumer Secret, Access Token, Access Secret) in the code.
After having established the connection, we used the command search_tweets to obtain the tweet data about Giving Tuesday. We started with a search number of 100.000 tweets without retweets. Due to restrictions of the Twitter programming interface (API), setting the parameter retryonratelimit to TRUE allowed for re-connects and stepwise data download.

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Code Snippet 1: Get rtweet package, connect to API and obtain data

Analysis

We ended up with 53.653 records in the data frame rt. As the R package in combination with the Twitter API allows the data extraction of the last 6 to 9 days, our data pretty much reflects the Twitter activities regarding Giving Tuesday 2018.

Drawing upon our initial question, we now turned to researching how “international” Giving Tuesday has become. The package rtweet allows the extraction of longitude and latitude data for the respective tweets. This then enabled us to draw a world map of tweets. A warning message told us that no such data could be obtained for 51.000 of the 53.000 tweet records. Regardless of that and assuming that the 2.000 tweets for which we got the data are somewhat representative, we used the package leaflet for a plot. It is visible, that tweeting about Giving Tuesday predominantly happens in the US and the UK.
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Code Snippet 2: Map

​In contrast to scarce geographical information, language information was mostly complete for the tweet data and therefore allows us to the analyse the international relevance of Giving Tuesday even better. The vast majority of tweets is English. Apart from some 500 tweets with undefined language, French and Spanish are the runners-up. 
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Code Snippet 3: Barplot languages

​What about the timing of the tweets? We extracted the creation dates of the tweets and visualize them in a barplot. Non surprisingly, the 27th of November, i.e. Giving Tuesday itself shows by far the highest number of tweets. There is also notable activity the day before and after with some 6.000 tweets.
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Code Snippet 4: Barplot Dates 

​In order to analyse the virality of the Giving Tuesday tweets, we measured and plotted the number of retweets. Our plot below shows that some 38.000 tweets did not get retweeted at all, some 8.000 received 1 retweet and so on (up to 6 retweets). 

Code Snippet 5: Barplot Retweets

We then extracted and ordered the respective data to find out which one was the most viral tweet in the dataset. It is by Fred Guttenberg, an American activist against gun violence. His 14-year-old daughter Jaime Guttenberg was killed in the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting on February 14, 2018. This is his tweet:

Please honor Jaime's memory and help us with the Orange Ribbons For Jaime mission by supporting on Giving Tuesday. Thank you for your support.https://t.co/ZtZacgV0Q1

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) November 27, 2018

Our example shows on the one hand that social media analyses can be conducted relatively easily, on the other hand we saw that Giving Tuesday is about to become a truly global phenomenon. So prepare for Giving Tuesday 2019 which might fit well into your Christmas fundraising. Speaking of Christmas:
​On behalf of joint systems I wish our dear readers a very merry Christmas 2018 and a good start into a successful, healthy and happy 2019 - read you there! :-)