Grading #AmericaWants on the Curve

So we know that To Write Love On Her Arms (@TWLOHA) won the USA Today #AmericaWants competition. They now get to create a full-page advertisement and see it run for free as the prize for their efforts.

But who did the most with what they had?

TWLOHA has over 77,000 followers on Twitter.
JJ's List has 377.
charity:water has 1,314,766.

It is fair to say that the organizations started the competition with different "tweetable resources." That being said, I have taken the figures from the competition and the top 100 ranking and graded it "on a curve" to see which orgs were able to get the most tweets per follower. I had to make a few assumptions:

• Only those organizations in the top 100 are considered, so the 60,342 were split amongst the group. This should not affect the analysis significantly.
• I have applied a smooth distribution of the tweets/votes for the sake of comparison. While this is certainly not how the tweets were split between the 100 organizations, it provides relative data for comparison.
  

A few items of note that I stumbled upon in the data:

• There is not one institution of higher education in the list. Considering the number of alumni and fans many large institutions have, it is disappointing that none are represented. This is further illustration that higher education institutions are less likely to be recognized by alumni as a non-profit institution (a study we conducted during my tenure at the University of Michigan found that over 70% of recent graduates did not realize the institution was not-for-profit). This also illustrates the difficulty higher education often has in making its case seem in need of urgent support and attention. It could also indicate that the often-bureaucratic environment of higher education management was unable to react in the same nimble fashion other organizations could.
• Twenty - one out of five! - organizations did not have a link to their Twitter account on their org's home page. This needs to be remedied! Some examples of promoting your social-media presence nicely on a home page: VH-1 Save The Music, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the Lupus Research Institute and UNICEF.
  

• The breakdown of the top 100 by category:

1. Medical (35 orgs)
2. Relief (17)
3. Children (14)
4. Community (8)
5. Animals (7)
6. Legal/Justice (5)
7. Environment (3)
8. Agriculture / LGBTQ / Music / Religious (2 each)
9. Camping / Disabilities / Military (1 each)

Now... drum roll please... the organizations that did the most (got the most tweets) with the least (with the lowest number of followers):

1. The ALS Therapy Development Institute - estimated 32.9 tweets per follower
2. Levantando Chile Fund - 22.3 t/f
3. American Partnership for Eosinophilic Disorders - 18.8 t/f
   
4. The Carcinoid Cancer Foundation - 7.0 t/f
5. The Pablove Foundation - 4.8 t/f
6. teensMAD4Rwanda - 4.78 t/f
7. Down Syndrome Association of Orange County - 4.6 t/f
8. Thrive Africa - 4.3 t/f
9. The Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation- 3.9 t/f
10. aHomeinHaiti.org - 2.2 t/f
    
11. Ride for Kids - 2.1 t/f
    
12. Camp Fire USA - 1.8 t/f
    
13. Essilor Vision Foundation - 1.29 t/f
    
14. Drop in the Bucket - 1.28 t/f
    
15. Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure - 1.24 t/f
    
16. Children's Healthcare of Atlanta - 1.23 t/f
    
17. Small Army for a Cause 1.2 t/f
    
18. JJ's List - 1.0 t/f
    
19. LA's BEST - 0.7 t/f
    
20. Dreamcatchers for Abused Children - 0.6 t/f

Average of the top 100? 0.018 t/f.

Obviously you did not have to be a follower of the organization to tweet your vote, but this provides a scale for comparison. So CONGRATULATIONS to all of these organizations for doing a great job getting organized and promoting their efforts... including our "#AmericaWants on the Curve" winner, the ALS Therapy Development Institute - visit their page here:

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