Facebook Crawling: Nonprofit page analysis

My Facebook analysis compares activity for the Ronald McDonald House Charity of Maine (RMHC) page to the United Way Portland page. Although charities do not 'compete' with each other in the sense that business do, they still work to get the attention of a select group of people. Our client has mentioned that the United Way has a very strong presence in the Portland area so it was interesting to analyze this data to see if the Facebook activity data reflected this perceived popularity.

Using the Graph API tool, I was able to pull the ID numbers and then extract activity data for each Facebook page. A JSON to CSV converter tool was utilized to extract the data to a more user-friendly Excel table.

ID numbers used for RMHC and United Way: 

JSON response pages: 

RMHC: 

United Way:

To begin, I compared basic totals for each page. For all interaction types (shares, reactions, likes, comments), the United Way doubles the totals from RMHC with 3,130 and 1,402 respectively. It would be natural to suspect that the United Way has more followers on their page but they only have 2,354 compared to RMHC’s 3,680. Since the RMHC page is state-wide this could explain the larger number of followers, but it appears that the people who follow the United Way page are far more interactive than those that follow RMHC. When considering average activity by total number of posts, the United Way averages about 31, while the RMHC page averages at 14. For post types, RMHC posts quite a few more events than the United Way but this could be due to the fact that the RMHC page covers activities for both the Portland and Bangor area whereas the United Way page is specific to Portland.

Chart of interactions by post type: 

When looking at the performance of content in the above chart, I decided to average out the total number of all interaction types by total number of post type to accommodate for the influence of the amount of each type of post. Photos and videos are equally strong for RMHC while photos have a higher average of total interactions on the United Way page. Event posts have the lowest average total interaction for both organizations with RMHC only averaging 4.5 and the United Way at a stronger level of 16.67. Links perform better on the United Way page at an average of 21 total interactions per link post vs. only 8 on the RMHC page.

Summary tables for each Facebook page: 

I used ‘likes’ as a benchmark for post-performance but filtering by ‘reactions’ also produced the same top two posts for RMHC and United Way. The top two posts for RMHC were those that thanked large organizations for their recent volunteer time. The connection to these corporations likely influenced more visibility and reactions from people connected to those companies. For the United Way, the top post was about a ‘loaned executive’ program that tagged several employees from Maine companies. Of course, tagging several of the largest companies in the state of Maine will aid in boosting your reactions due to the increased visibility. The second most popular post was in regard to a record-setting food drive for the Wayside Food Program. The post included several photos from the event and garnered 12 shares, which is a high engagement number for this page.

Upon reviewing the data and also looking through each organization’s Facebook page, it is clear that connecting to local businesses is beneficial in boosting post performance. The United Way always links to related businesses and organizations in their posts, while RMHC will mention groups, but not always link them to the post. Additionally, the United Way page is dedicated to the Portland area whereas the RMHC page covers both the Portland and Bangor locations. Keeping posts local boosts the relevance for followers and could be a contributing factor to the increased engagement on the United Way page.