Reviewing the 2018 CASE Europe conference on Twitter
What can social media tell us about #CEAC18?

The CASE Europe annual conference came to Edinburgh in August 2018, giving university advancement and fundraising professionals a “unique opportunity to come together to learn, connect, celebrate and shape the future of education.”

The 2018 conference was the largest in CASE Europe’s history, with over 1000 attendees gathering at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. Of course, the EICC wasn’t the only place where the attendees interacted, with a search of Twitter* revealing over 2000 tweets containing the #CEAC18 hashtag.
Read our thoughts on the underlying trends from the Ross-CASE report
We took a look at all of those tweets to see what we can learn about the thoughts and take-home messages from this year’s CASE conference. By looking at what the attendees saw as the key points of the conference, what can we learn about the current state of advancement, and what did people see as the important messages?
An overview of conference Twitter activity
Using the R statistical software, we queried the Twitter database for all messages containing the #CEAC18 hashtag and created a dataset containing various metrics on each tweet, such as the text of the tweet and the number of times it was favourited.
Looking at the number of tweets sent each day, we can see that Twitter activity picked up on the opening Monday as the Newcomers’ Fast Track programme began, but peaked on the first day of the main conference on Tuesday, remaining high for the remaining two days of the main programme on Wednesday and Thursday.

If we break down the tweet activity to ‘original’ content and retweets, an interesting pattern emerges, with a roughly even balance of tweets to retweets in the days leading up to the conference, but with more tweets than retweets during the days of the conference.

Tweets during the week of the conference
If we turn our attention to focus on tweets from the week of the conference, we can uncover the top conference tweeters, as well as see the top words used in #CEAC18 tweets, see which tweets got the most engagement and perform sentiment analysis to get a feel for the overall ‘positivity’ of the messages.
Filtering out the retweets and starting with the top tweeters, it’s not a surprise to see CASE_Europe take the top spot, closely followed by thenativetweets, who were there with Dave Musson presenting a session on podcasting, and HE recruitment and Marketing Director cabowick. microjology and HootArmstrong completed the top five.

Looking at the top words that appeared in #CEAC18 tweets, universities and university topped the list, with rubywax, who gave the opening plenary, taking position three. But it’s some of the other words in the list that catch the eye: ‘alumni’, ‘students’, ‘people’, ‘team’, ‘world’. The appearance of these words suggests that the underlying theme of the conference was about a global community of people.

Using a ‘lexicon’ of words associated with a general positive or negative sentiment, we can see that the general tone of #CEAC18 twitter activity was positive, with a median positive sentiment of one and a distribution skewed towards the right, showing a long tail of more positively-voiced tweets.

Tweet engagement
The most favourited tweet of the conference is perhaps unsurprising, with this tweet from TriciaKing1 collecting 53 favourites as the main conference programme was about to launch with Ruby Wax’s plenary lecture:
Backstage with the fabulous Ruby Wax. About to launch #CEAC18.
- TriciaKing1
There was a tie for the top retweeted tweet, with tweets from MPadmoreUEA and GeneralJimbo both being retweeted eleven times:
Rock on Ruth, sharing @UEAGighistory with #CEAC18 and picking up her Circle of Excellence award. She’s #UEA’s A-lister of the day — so proud!!
— MPadmoreUEA
Great to hear from @SirBobKerslake about the role of civic universities as anchor institutions: understanding their place and communities more @sheffhallamuni @UPP_Foundation @CASE_Europe We must do more to support this initiative through our work #CEAC18 #Sheffieldissuper
— GeneralJimbo
#CEAC18 on Twitter
As the CASE Europe 2018 conference was a sell-out, there may well have been people who weren’t able to attend, as well as some who couldn’t attend as departmental budgets may not allow it.
With increasing use of clear event hashtags, combined with more delegates interacting with each other, with speakers and with organisers on social media, there is a wealth of data available that can be used to gain valuable insight from the conference, even for those unable to attend.
From looking at word use in this year’s conference, it seems apparent that a lot of the focus is on people: alumni, students and teams in particular. There is a lot more information contained within the original tweets beyond that, but for a simple takeaway of the key themes, single word analysis can provide a surprising amount of information.
From looking at the number of tweets, the number of tweeters, the sentiment and the engagement, this year’s CASE Europe conference can call itself a social media success and, with a sell-out year and an increase in delegate numbers of 30%, there’s certainly more than social media to notice about #CEAC18…
For more thoughts from Cairney & Company, check out cairneyandcompany/thinking

Cairney & Company is a global company of innovative and creative fundraisers, strategists, communicators, researchers, trainers and coaches, based in the UK, USA, Canada and Hong Kong.
*The Twitter search was performed on Sunday 2nd September and the analysis represents a snapshot of that time. Changes to the dataset since that time, such as tweets being deleted or changes to the number of retweets will not be reflected in this analysis.
