#GivingTuesday Celebrates Generosity on Social Media

By Naomi Morenzoni

This week we celebrated #GivingTuesday, an amazing day when when businesses, charities, families and students around the world come together for one common purpose: to put the spotlight on generosity. Social media is key to making sure that the #GivingTuesday message grows and reaches new audiences and people took this to heart — more than 440,000 tweets mentioned #GivingTuesday in 24 hours.

The charity leading Tuesday’s social conversation was the (RED) campaign, a nonprofit that aims to deliver the first AIDS free generation in over thirty years. #GivingTuesday also happens to fall on World AIDS Day, which helped the (RED) campaign generate a significant amount of buzz. The nonprofit also drove social conversations by partnering with Uber on Tuesday to allow every rider in the U.S. to contribute $5 to the (RED) campaign on top of their UberX fare.

#WorldAIDSDay was the most popular hashtag followed by #Unselfie, a hashtag that proliferated as part of #GivingTuesday to highlight how people are trading in duck face selfies for altruistic photos that show a cause they support.

It feels good to give, and this positive sentiment was noticeable throughout social media, with individuals saying they were “feeling good” about donating to health, poverty and social causes. Social media buzz also shows that we like to follow people who do good — tweets from celebrities and well-known philanthropists, including Melinda Gates, were often retweeted during the day.

#GivingTuesday is particularly special at Salesforce, where giving back, through our 1–1–1 model of integrated philanthropy, has been a part of our culture day one. Last year on #GivingTuesday, we announced Pledge 1% along with Atlassian, Rally for Impact and Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. Pledge 1% is a movement dedicated to making the world a better place by inspiring, fostering and celebrating early stage corporate philanthropy — encouraging companies to dedicate 1% of equity, product employee time or profit to improve communities around the world. This year, we proudly announced that more than 500 companies joined Pledge 1% in its first year — including high-growth companies like DocuSign, Glassdoor, Lookout, Twilio, Xactly and Zuora. In the coming year, we hope to secure another 1,000 pledges.

Check out the full Slideshare analysis below for more on #GivingTuesday: