What is sentiment data and how can it help your charity comms?

Types of sentiment analysis

 

Sentiment analysis is designed to detect ’polarity’ (a positive or negative opinion) in a piece of text: whether it’s a whole document, paragraph, sentence or clause. But it can also focus on emotions such as angry, happy or sad or even intentions such as interested or not interested.

 

Apart from simple polarity of opinion, types of sentiment analysis include:

 

 

 

Fine-grained sentiment analysis

 

This provides a much more precise level of polarity than just ’negative’ or ‘positive’ by breaking sentiment down into a scale (such as a 5-star rating system from ’very happy’ to ’very unhappy’). While automatically generated by a computer gathering the data, this is similar to the way a customer service survey might be carried out or someone might fill in a review.

 

 

 

Emotion detection

 

Emotion detection picks up on certain trigger words that express a specific emotion, from happiness to frustration, shock, anger and worry. This can be a lot more complex because a machine learning algorithm needs to be trained to grasp the context of what’s being said, or risk making a wrong extrapolation – not always an easy feat for a computer, but this is where natural language processing gets clever.

 

Taking it one step further, intent-based analysis recognises the actions or intended actions behind a certain emotion, anticipates the next step they might take and responds automatically or prompts someone to step in and help them.

 

 

 

Aspect-based sentiment analysis

 

Aspect-based analysis looks beyond the surface level sentiment to the wider context of the specific thing (product, service, feature, service element, etc.) being positively or negatively mentioned, instead of just assuming they’re talking about an organisation or brand as a whole.

 

 

 

How to get started

 

Social listening can be a great way to analyse the mentions you’re recieving online and better understand people’s feelings and emotions, with sentiment analysis as a subset of that.

 

The beauty of social listening is that there is a huge amount of data to analyse, and social media is the number one place to connect with communities. Knowing what inspires action and engagement across their target audiences can help charities craft messaging that truly makes a difference in the communities they hope to reach.

 

 

 

The right tools for the job

 

There are a large number of ’software-as-a-service’ (SaaS) social listening tools and platforms now available to run from the cloud, many built specifically for non-profit organisations including:

 

Awario – a social listening platform specifically for charities which includes social and news monitoring, volunteer outreach and sentiment analysis, with notifications about what’s going on in your specific niche and influencer marketing assistance.

 

Keyhole – A social media analytics tool designed specifically for charities, with advanced sentiment analysis that includes brand, campaign and influencer monitoring.

 

Other SaaS platforms specialising in sentiment analysis for general organisations and businesses include:

• Quick Search – a sentiment analytics tool that focuses on social mentions and engagement
• HubSpot’s Service Hub tool, which focuses on customer service feedback
• Repustate and Lexalytics – Advanced text analytics tools for customer responses
• Critical Mention and Brandwatch, which can alert you to positive and negative mentions in the media and news
• Social Mention – a free tool that offers great value for money and can plug into social media to analyse specific keywords and the sentiments people are expressing along with them