Impact of Online Health Awareness Campaign: Case of National Eating Disorders Association
This work addresses the problem of measuring campaign effectiveness for nonprofit organizations, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to new data.
The paper models the impact of the National Eating Disorders Association's awareness campaign on user behavior, finding that governmental and nonprofit accounts attract the most retweets, and identifies shifts in linguistic categories such as increased mentions of women, family, and anxiety post-intervention.
National Eating Disorders Association conducts a NEDAwareness week every year, during which it publishes content on social media and news aimed to raise awareness of eating disorders. Measuring the impact of these actions is vital for maximizing the effectiveness of such interventions. This paper is an effort to model the change in behavior of users who engage with NEDAwareness content. We find that, despite popular influencers being involved in the campaign, it is governmental and nonprofit accounts that attract the most retweets. Furthermore, examining the tweeting language of users engaged with this content, we find linguistic categories concerning women, family, and anxiety to be mentioned more within the 15 days after the intervention, and categories concerning affiliation, references to others, and positive emotion mentioned less. We conclude with actionable implications for future campaigns and discussion of the method's limitations.