YouTubers have raised more than $10 million in less than a week as part of a fundraiser to plant 20 million trees globally through the Arbor Day Foundation. The initiative is called Team Trees and has tons of YouTubers flooding the platform, asking for subscribers to donate. Social media analysis is perfect to capture this kind of quick-growing movement.
Tech execs joining the trend
The movement has picked up momentum incredibly quickly with several high profile tech executives catching on and making large donations. Elon Musk of Tesla donated $1 million and Tobi Lutke of Shopify donated $1,000,001. Similarly, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube donated $200,000 and Jack Dorsey of Twitter donated a total of $350,000.
YouTubers Unite
Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast on YouTube, was the driving force for organizing Team Trees, made two separate donations adding up to $200,002. YouTubers saw it as an opportunity to prove that they could be a collective force for good and joined in. Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, donated $69,420, and Jessica and Tyler Blevins, aka Ninja, donated $15,000. Interested parties can also follow along with the number of trees planted thanks to a live donations tracker on the video streaming platform.
The fundraiser was also a catalyst for lots of content. Tens of millions of views have amassed on the more than 500 videos posted to YouTube about the project. More than a dozen videos have more than 1 million views each.
What can we learn from social media analysis?
We decided that this quickly growing movement would be great to look at through the lens of advanced social listening software. Synthesio tracked online conversations and interactions of the #TeamTrees movement and was able to discover a lot about who was participating in the commotion. According to Synthesio, these are the top YouTube influencers.
A peek at sentiment analysis shows that discussions about the campaign were overwhelmingly positive. Fully 86% of interactions on YouTube and Twitter were positive.
Next, the top 10 keywords revealed lots of conversation geared toward boosting donations and raising awareness.
Social listening uncovered that the demographics of individuals engaging in the #TeamTrees discussion was almost entirely people younger than 35.
Finally, YouTube took the spotlight in this movement. About 60% of interactions happening in the form of comments, shares, and views on the video streaming site. However, Twitter followed up next at 29%, and Instagram took the back seat with 10%.
Global environmental impact
Support of the #TeamTrees movement swelled among young people online. This attitude is reflective of people’s increased interest globally about the environment. The internet allows us the special ability to organize strong movements for good in short periods. Consequently, planting 20 million trees would make a difference in the gigantic dent that human activity has made on our forest ecosystems.
For more insights regarding our global climate and interaction online, check out our in-depth climate change report.
To donate, visit Team Trees.
