In a final push to reach the exciting mark of 30,000 followers on Twitter, Nonprofit Quarterly launched a campaign asking our followers to describe their nonprofit community in just five words, using the hashtag #np5words. We hoped this Twitter campaign would give us further insights into what our Twitter audience, and the nonprofit sector as a whole, value in their own organizations and their communities. Twitter users were also encouraged to vote for a nonprofit by mentioning them in their tweet, and NPQ rewarded the organizations with the most tweets with a special advertising opportunity in our print magazine and online mailing.
The feedback was great. In just over three weeks, we received over 250 tweets representing 144 different organizations. NPQ put together an infographic to share some of the findings in our Twitter campaign, as well as highlight some of the great tweets we received.
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The infographic points to some trends, most notably regarding the words our users chose to represent their favorite organizations. The word cloud, which depicts words sized proportionately to the number of times they were used throughout the challenge, reveals “leader” as the most frequently used by a great margin. This makes sense, as 20 percent of all the tweets we received were in support of an organization dedicated to developing youth into nonprofit leaders, but this also shows how valued leadership skills are in the nonprofit sector. The Young Nonprofit Professionals Network (@ynpn) took the first-place prize, receiving an impressive 48 total mentions throughout the challenge.
Among the 144 different organizations mentioned throughout the project, there was a striking amount of diversity in geographical location, from South Africa (@James127Trust) to Port-au-Prince (@thinkingdevelop), we saw organizations based in cities around the world. With this in mind, it’s heartwarming to see the second most-used term was “community,” which alludes to the nonprofit sector’s dedication to bringing like-minded people together for a worthy cause. This focus on building or strengthening a community, regardless of where on the globe it happens, is a true testament to the hard work of these organizations to create change and take action where it matters most for them.
Yet, as visible in the graphically featured tweets, a continued focus across the board was an initiative to be inclusive. Words like “everyone,” “all,” and “world” appear multiple times throughout just these selected few, let alone the 264 others.
So, is it possible to be dedicated to community-building work that has an international impact? Definitely. It’s what makes the global nonprofit sector so hard to represent in just five words…which is exactly why we asked you to do it that way.—Julia Miller and Aine Creedon
