The hashtag #SAGoesOrange, created by the San Antonio Food Bank for their participation in Hunger Action Month, was analyzed. Data showed the hashtag was used in 23 tweets in 2015, mostly by the Food Bank and companies, unlike 36 tweets in 2014 including individuals. The hashtag seems to be failing due to the small size of the Food Bank and the hashtag being too broad and narrow. Recommendations include promoting the hashtag more at events and having one nationwide hashtag through Feeding America to engage more people.

1. Abstract
The following report is a study of the San Antonio Food Bank’s twitter, mainly the hashtag they
created for the month of September – also known as Hunger Action Month, as deemed by the
Feeding America organization. The hashtag, #SAGoesOrange, is analyzed by those using the
hashtag and the success of the hashtag based on research done in these field previously.
Following an analysis of data collected from Twitter about how the hashtag is being used are a
couple theories about why the hashtag seems to be failing. After that, recommendations are made
so that the hashtag, and the message of the organization, can succeed in years to come. This
study gives the San Antonio Food Bank – as well as other small, local, non-profit organizations –
the tools to improve their online campaign strategies so that more people are reached and the
general population has the opportunity to participate in the campaign online. Data was collected
and analyzed then compared to other campaigns as well as other reports and studies on how
hashtags can affect the online community. The conclusion drawn in the report is that the hashtag,
#SAGoesOrange, has failed in its purpose to bring attention to Hunger Action Month. However,
recommendations are made which can improve the San Antonio Food Banks online campaigning
and can be applied to other, like-minded, organizations.
Keywords: Hashtag, #SAGoesOrange, Twitter, Hunger Action Month, online campaign
Introduction
The month of September has been deemed Hunger Action Month by the charity
organization Feeding America. The purpose of this month, according to the charity’s website, is
to allow the general population to partner with their local food banks so they can participate in a
good cause by advocating and raising awareness, making donations, or volunteering (America,

2. 2015). Feeding America has designated the color orange – in the same way breast cancer has the
color pink – to help raise awareness of Hunger Action Month. The San Antonio Food Bank (SA
Food Bank, from here on out), a member of the Feeding America organization, is participating in
Hunger Action Month, too. On their website, they state that their participation in Hunger Action
month is supposed to “raise awareness and engage local businesses, government and the
community to raise awareness and take action to fight hunger” (Bank, 2015).
As evident by the Greenpeace campaign to get Facebook to stop using coal, online
campaigns are not only possible, but very effective when done correctly. Although the research
for that project was focused on the Facebook page that Greenpeace created for the campaign, a
lot of their results can be applied to many other social media platforms. The research in the
following analysis studied the effect that the SA Food Bank’s hashtag, #SAGoesOrange had on
Twitter – how many people used the hashtag, the amount of tweets containing the hashtag, as
well as whether or not it was successful. The analysis will also detail some of the possible causes
behind the failure of this hashtag, as well as ways the SA Food Bank – and other organizations
with a similar goal – can adjust their social media tactics to better reach the general population.
Before stepping into the analysis of the hashtag, one needs to know what, exactly, a
hashtag is. According to an article posted on Mashable.com, a hashtag is “a topic with a hash
symbol ("#") at the start to identify it…. [It] help[s] spread information on Twitter while also
helping to organize it” (Parr, 2009). However, despite the attributes, a hashtag does more than
spread and organize information. Hashtags have evolved to create a sense of community when
being used by Twitter users (and now Instagram and Facebook users, as well). One can bet that
at just about every event that young adults attend, a hashtag will be promoted so that tweets,

3. pictures and videos of the event will be easily accessible for those who want to see what others at
the event are doing.
As stated earlier, the SA Food Bank created the hashtag #SAGoesOrange in order to
bring attention to the fact that September is Hunger Action month, and the SA Food Bank is
participating in it. What follows will first explain the benefit of using hashtags. From there the
study will explore how the SA Food Bank has been using their hashtag; I will discuss the various
tweets that contain the hashtag, as well as who has been using them. The third item discussed
will be the possible causes of the hashtags success, or lack thereof. Lastly, a list of
recommendations that can be applied not only to the #SAGoesOrange campaign, but also to any
organization that faces the same obstacles of the SA Food Bank, but wants their campaign to
succeed on social media.
Why Use Hashtags?
Weiguo Fan and Michael D. Gordon wrote in their article The Power of Social Media
Analytics that “Twitter… [is the] eighth most-trafficked site on the Internet, as of April 2014”
(Fan & Gordon, 2014, p. 75). They also included some staggering statistics in their article that
present the importance of being able to campaign on Twitter: “Users spend more than 20% of
their time online on social media sites…. As of October 2012…140 million active Twitter users
sent more than 340 million tweets” (Fan & Gordon, 2014, p. 75). These numbers show us just
how many people are using Twitter. The ability to reach even a miniscule number of these users

4. would greatly increase foot traffic to a company’s website and, therefore, their products and
ideas.
Hashtags come into play because, as stated in The Power of Social Media Analytics,
“hashtags on Twitter (as well as other social-media platforms) give users another quick and easy
way to express their likes, dislikes, interests, and concerns, presenting further opportunities (or
challenges) to business striving to use them” (Fan & Gordon, 2014, p. 75). The point of this
statement is that hashtags connect people. They allow people from all over the world to connect
with one another based on the words coming after the # symbol. And, if a Twitter user can
properly use a hashtag, they can join a community to see and share ideas about which they are
passionate. This provides an excellent opportunity not just to businesses, as stated by Fan and
Gordon, but also to non-profits.
Mentioned before was the Greenpeace campaign to get Facebook to stop using coal to
power their IT plants. In a study done by Merav Katz-Kimichi and Idit Manosevitch about the
aforementioned campaign, it is shown that more people can be united and support a common
cause through the use of social media. They speak of the term “connective action”: a phrase
used to describe the desire in everyone to share ideas, plans, images, and resources with others
(Katz-Kimchi & Manosevitch, 2015, p. 253). Because of this desire, taking a campaign online
can be very effective, as shown by the Greenpeace campaign.

5. #SAGoesOrange: Who’s Using It?
Of the tweets posted between August 28, 2015 and September 8, 2015, the hashtag
#SAGoesGoes was used in twenty-three tweets. Of those
tweets, ten were sent out by the San Antonio Food Bank,
themselves. Ten by the different Ancira car companies in San
Antonio, and three by the Towers of America twitter account.
Compare this to last year where, between the end of August
and the beginning of October, the hashtag was used in thirty-
six tweets. A majority of those tweets were used by personal
twitter accounts and were sent out at a specific event held by the SA Food Bank and their
partner, Whataburger. This data can be seen clearly in Table 1. An analysis of this data reveals
some critical points.
First, this data can tell us that the hashtag is being used by more companies this year.
This means, of course, that the average twitter user (and, therefore, the general population) is not
actively participating with the campaign online. Although some might argue that online
participation is hard, if not impossible, to track, I say that the lack of tweets containing the
hashtag by personal twitter accounts speaks against this fact. An article by Su Mon Kywe, Tuan-
Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim, and Feida Zhu called On Recommending Hashtags in Twitter
Networks analyzes every single tweet sent by over 150,000 users in Singapore between October
2011 and December 2011 – roughly 44 million tweets. From this data, they analyzed the
hashtags used: who sent them, their popularity, the amount of hashtags per tweet, as well as
some other, interesting data. Bringing focus, however, to the section about Hashtag Usage, the
article states that, based on their data, “many users know how to use hashtags but very few
Number of Tweets
containing the
hashtag:2015
23
Number of Tweets
containing the
hashtag:2014
36
Number of tweets
with hashtag by the
SA Food Bank:
2015
10
Number of tweets
with hashtag by
anyone else: 2015
13
Table 1: Data collected from Twitter

6. actually tweet a lot using hashtags” (Kwye, Hoang, Lim, & Zhu, 2012). One can apply their
observation to the issue of #SAGoesOrange in this way: twitter users know how to use the
hashtag, they just are not using it. The question then becomes, why? A question that will be
addressed in the next section.
Second, an analysis of the tweets themselves show us that the hashtag is used only to
bring attention to the events being held during Hunger Action Month by the SA Food Bank.
What is lacking, however, is an invitation for others to use the hashtag. Other, successful,
hashtags ask others to tweet using their hashtag. One example, as shown in figure 1, is Coke’s
new hashtag, #ShareaCoke. The tweet invites others to use the hashtag, even including a special
emoji that one can only use if accompanied by the hashtag. There are now 517 original tweets
containing Coca-Cola’s hashtag. While it is unfair to compare an international company to a
local, non-profit organization, one could make an argument saying that inviting people to use a
hashtag will get more tweets containing the hashtag and, through that, more publicity for the
creators of the hashtag.
Why Is It Failing?
Hashtags are hard to study because there is no uniform way to go about doing so.
However, Lei Yang, Tao Sun, Ming Zhang, and Qiaozhu Mei wrote an article called We Know
What @You #Tag, in which they “propose comprehensive measures to quantify the major factors
of how a user selects content tags as well as joins communities” (Yang, Sun, Zhang, & Mei,
2012, p. Abstract). This article makes the observation that “by creating a hashtag, a user either
invents and shares a new bookmark (of content) or initializes and spreads a coat of arms (of a
community), or both” (Yang, Sun, Zhang, & Mei, 2012, p. 262). Ideally, the hashtag
#SAGoesOrange would do the latter: create a sense of community around those who use it. It is
Fig. 1. Tweet by Coca-Cola using
the hashtag #ShareaCoke

7. not doing that, however, as made evident by the lack of personal twitter accounts using the
hashtag. There may be a few reasons behind this.
The first possible cause for the failure of the hashtag is that the organization is small. The
SA Food Bank only has about 8,995 followers and, while this may seem like a lot, one can
compare it to the roughly 400,000 twitter users in San Antonio1 and see that they are not
reaching a large portion of San Antonio’s population. Because they simply do not reach a lot of
people to begin with, the hashtag they created will not get a lot of exposure on the timelines of
local San Antonio twitter users.
Another possible reason the hashtag is failing is because the hashtag is too broad and too
narrow at the same time. What I mean by that is, on the one hand, the hashtag contains the words
“Goes Orange,” but for those not directly involved in the Food Bank or who do not know about
Hunger Action Month, this may be very confusing – this was made evident by several interviews
I conducted with my fellow UTSA students who are actively on twitter and who confess to not
knowing what the hashtag is about or what it means. For the most part, colors are assigned to
months by non-profit organizations to raise awareness – just like all the breast cancer
organizations did with the color pink and the month October. The issue with Feeding America’s
association with orange and September is that it is not well known. If not for the context
surrounding most of the tweets, no one would know what “Go Orange” means. On the other
hand, it also contains the letters “SA,” meaning those outside San Antonio cannot use the
hashtag, even if their city or county is serviced by the SA Food Bank, which actually services 16
1 This number was found by findingthe ratio of total US Twitter users versus the US population (28% of the US
population aremonthly activetwitter users) and usingthat ratio on the population of San Antonio

8. different counties. These are only theories, but they are possibly the reason behind the failure of
the hashtag.
Recommendations
Several recommendations come out of this analysis. They both address the issues stated
in the previous section.
The first issue of the SA Food Bank being too small cannot be easily addressed. They
cannot make more people follow them, after all. However, the SA Food Bank does host a lot of
events this month. If they promote the hashtag at all their events – and by promote, I mean place
it on every flyer and announce it at every event – people who attend the events will be more
motivated to use the hashtag. This, in turn, will get more exposure for the events, which will get
more people out at the events, which leads to more people using the hashtag. By asking people
outright at events held by the SA Food Bank to use #SAGoesOrange in their tweets, posts, and
photos, people will feel part of a community and they will be more motivated to use the hashtag.
The second issue cannot be addressed by the SA Food Bank, but by Feeding America –
the creators of Hunger Action Month. The goal of Hunger Action Month is to, primarily, raise
awareness of the hunger issue in America. That goal is not being met, however. The best way to
fix this issue is to have a nation-wide hashtag, as opposed to small, local hashtags. One, specific
hashtag would better benefit the cause than having each food bank partnered with Feeding
America use their own hashtags. The article We Know What @You #Tag states that, “by adopting
an existing hashtag, a user either presents her interest in a topic, or presents her intent to obtain a
community membership, or both” (Yang, Sun, Zhang, & Mei, 2012, p. 262). People use hashtags
to be a part of a community. Usually, the bigger communities tend to attract more people. So if

9. Feeding America united the individual food banks and created one community under one
hashtag, the online success of Hunger Action Month may greatly increase.
Conclusion
Hashtags are powerful tools on social media. Once mastered, a company can more fully
control their online campaigns. The ability to do this becomes even more critical for non-profit
organizations because social media is free. The SA Food Bank attempted to make an appearance
online this month with their hashtag #SAGoesOrange in order to raise awareness for Hunger
Action Month, originated by Feeding America. However, as I have discovered with the careful
analysis of the hashtag and the tweets in which they are contained, one will notice that the
hashtag is not performing the way it should be.
I addressed how important using a hashtag can be when trying to reach the online
community, but also spoke about how #SAGoesOrange is not meeting those standards. The
majority of tweets containing the hashtag are written by the SA Food Bank, the rest are written
by various companies, and there are no tweets using the hashtag by personal twitter accounts. An
analysis was done to provide theories as to why the hashtag was failing, and two possible reasons
were presented: the organization is too small and the hashtag is both too broad and too narrow at
the same time, not allowing people outside San Antonio to use it while not making clear what,
exactly, “Go Orange” means. Last, I made recommendations based on interviews with my fellow
peers as well as research conducted on hashtags. The recommendations were to both the SA
Food Bank as well as the Feeding America foundation; the first possible solution would be for
the SA Food Bank to actively promote their hashtag at every event. The more emphasis and
excitement they put behind the hashtag, the more people will want to include the hashtag in their
tweets. The other possible solution is for the Feeding America foundation to create a nationwide

10. hashtag; a hashtag that spans across the country would have a better chance of being recognized
and used more than if each individual food bank created and used their own hashtag.
This study can be applied to any organization that faces the same challenges as the SA
Food Bank. Any small, non-profit organization looking to make an impact on the online can
benefit from the research and results found in this study.
References
America, F. (2015). Hunger Action Month. Retrieved from feedingamerica.org:
http://www.feedingamerica.org/take-action/campaigns/hunger-action-
month.html?gclid=CjwKEAjw7O6vBRDpi7O-
8OWSkwESJACNFsgxta12XFbYwis8DK4lAa8JgrxBmsypS6E1emRacI0u9RoCU4vw_
wcB?referrer=https://www.google.com/
Bank, S. A. (2015). San Antonio Food Bank. Retrieved from safoodbank.org:
http://safoodbank.org/
Fan, W., & Gordon, M. D. (2014). The Power of Social Media Analytics. Communications of the
ACM, 74-81.
Katz-Kimchi, M., & Manosevitch, I. (2015). Mobilizing Facebook Users Against Facebook's
Energy Policy: The Case of Greenpease Unfriend Coal Campaign. In Environmental
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Kwye, S., Hoang, T.-A., Lim, E.-P., & Zhu, F. (2012). On Recommending Hashtags in Twitter
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mashable.com: http://mashable.com/2009/05/17/twitter-hashtags/#.S1eqgd1JgkI
Yang, L., Sun, T., Zhang, M., & Mei, Q. (2012). We Know What @You #Tag: Does the Dual
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