#SupportTheCause: Identifying Motivations to Participate in Online Health Campaigns

Abstract

We consider the task of automatically identifying participants' motivations in the public health campaign Movember and investigate the impact of the different motivations on the amount of campaign donations raised. Our classification scheme is based on the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (van Zomeren et al., 2008). We find that automatic classification based on Movember profiles is fairly accurate, while automatic classification based on tweets is challenging. Using our classifier, we find a strong relation between types of motivations and donations. Our study is a first step towards scaling-up collective action research methods.

On the Impact of Twitter-based Health Campaigns: A Cross-Country Analysis of Movember

“…We will also consider a temporal analysis of the donation/visitor data, comparing trends across several years of Movember donation data and Twitter activities. We also intend to incorporate more finegrained information about the Twitter users in our analyses, such as their motivations to participate in the campaign (Nguyen et al, 2015).…”

Tweet your #Mo and save a Bro

“…Second, I obtained Movember US data, including movement members' IDs, amount of collected donations, years of experience in the campaign, and gender, from the US Movember Foundation. Based on the work of Nguyen et al (2015), I merged the data from these two sources using a list of matched profiles of US users (N = 3,295) who were officially registered on the Movember website and had a Twitter account linked to their Movember profile at the time of the campaign. 23 These users represent the population of this study.…”

“…Third, since 2003 the Movember Foundation has run several editions of the campaign by attracting increasing numbers of members and participants for more than 10 years. The Movember campaign and movement have also piqued the interest of academics from various domains, including philanthropy (Jacobson, 2010;Robert, 2013), the study of nonprofit organizations (Neff & Moss, 2011), health (Bravo & Hoffman-Goetz, 2015;Wassersug, Oliffe, & Han, 2015), and communication and media (Jacobson & Mascaro, 2016;Nguyen, van den Broek, Hauff, Hiemstra, & Ehrenhard, 2015;Prasetyo et al, 2015). The recurrence of Movember campaigns over the years makes the Movember case a good example of a well-established and consolidated campaign.…”

“…Second, we obtained Movember data, such as members' total amount of collected donations, years of experience in the campaign, and gender, from the US Movember Foundation. We merged the Twitter and Movember data by linking movement members' accounts on the Movember website to their Twitter accounts (Nguyen et al, 2015).…”

“…Second, only a few studies combine social theory and NLP methods to study online identity in relation to collective action. One recent example uses the Social Identity Model of Collective Action (van Zomeren et al, 2008) to study health campaigns organized on Twitter (Nguyen et al, 2015). The authors automatically identify participants' motivations to take action online by analyzing profile descriptions and tweets.…”