Gregory D. Saxton

Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media

The rapid diffusion of “microblogging” services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates—“information,”“community,” and “action.” Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community-building practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media appears to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement.

Engaging Stakeholders Through Twitter: How Nonprofit Organizations Are Getting More Out of 140 Characters or Less

One hundred forty characters seems like too small a space for any meaningful information to be exchanged, but Twitter users have found creative ways to get the most out of each Tweet by using different communication tools. This paper looks into how 73 nonprofit organizations use Twitter to engage stakeholders not only through their tweets, but also through other various communication methods. Specifically, it looks into the organizations’ utilization of tweet frequency, following behavior, hyperlinks, hashtags, public messages, retweets, and multimedia files. After analyzing 4,655 tweets, the study found that the nation’s largest nonprofits are not using Twitter to maximize stakeholder involvement. Instead, they continue to use social media as a one-way communication channel, as less than 20% of their total tweets demonstrate conversations and roughly 16% demonstrate indirect connections to specific users.

Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations

This study examines what drives organizational adoption and use of social media through a model built around four key factors – strategy, capacity, governance and environment. Using Twitter, Facebook, and other data on 100 large US nonprofit organizations, the model is employed to examine the determinants of three key facets of social media utilization: (1) adoption, (2) frequency of use and (3) dialogue. We find that organizational strategies, capacities, governance features and external pressures all play a part in these social media adoption and utilization outcomes. Through its integrated, multi-disciplinary theoretical perspective, this study thus helps foster understanding of which types of organizations are able and willing to adopt and juggle multiple social media accounts, to use those accounts to communicate more frequently with their external publics, and to build relationships with those publics through the sending of dialogic messages.

Tweeting Social Change: How Social Media Are Changing Nonprofit Advocacy

How are nonprofit organizations utilizing social media to engage in advocacy work?   We address this question by investigating the social media use of 188 501(c)(3) advocacy organizations.   After briefly examining the types of social media technologies employed, we turn to an in-depth examination of the organizations’ use of Twitter. This in-depth message-level analysis is twofold: A content analysis that examines the prevalence of previously identified communicative and advocacy constructs in nonprofits’ social media messages; and an inductive analysis that explores the unique features and dynamics of social media-based advocacy and identifies new organizational practices and forms of communication heretofore unseen in the literature.

Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control

In this article, the authors first provide a practical yet rigorous definition of crowdsourcing that incorporates “crowds,” outsourcing, and social web technologies. They then analyze 103 well-known crowdsourcing web sites using content analysis methods and the hermeneutic reading principle. Based on their analysis, they develop a “taxonomic theory” of crowdsourcing by organizing the empirical variants in nine distinct forms of crowdsourcing models. They also discuss key issues and directions, concentrating on the notion of managerial control systems.

Accountability Online: Understanding the Web-Based Accountability Practices of Nonprofit Organizations

Nonprofit organizations are increasingly using Internet-based technologies to address accountability. This article presents a set of conceptual, theoretical, and empirical innovations to help understand this phenomenon. First, this article presents a conceptual framework that delineates two key dimensions of Web-based accountability practices: disclosure and dialogue. It then posits a four-factor explanatory model of online accountability incorporating organizational strategy, capacity, governance, and environment. Last, it tests the model through a content analysis of 117 U.S. community foundation Web sites combined with survey and financial data. The descriptive statistics show that the Web site has been more effectively used to provide financial and performance disclosures than to provide dialogic mechanisms for stakeholder input and interactive engagement. Our multivariate analyses, in turn, highlight capacity- and governance-related variables, especially asset size and board performance, as the most significant factors associated with the adoption of Web-based accountability practices.

What Do Stakeholders ‘Like’ on Facebook? Examining Public Reactions to Nonprofit Organizations’ Informational, Promotional, and Community-Building Messages

Although public relations scholarship has often discussed the possibilities of dialogue and engagement using social media, research has not truly explored this dynamic. Instead, research on social media platforms has focused on measuring the content and structure of organizational profiles. This study seeks to enhance the fields discussion about social media engagement by determining what organizational content individual stakeholders prefer on Facebook in terms of liking, commenting, and sharing. A content analysis of 1,000 updates from organizations on the Nonprofit Times 100 list indicates that, based on what they comment on and like, individuals prefer dialogic, as well as certain forms of mobilizational, messages; however, they are more likely to share one-way informational messages with their own networks. These findings are interpreted using practical and theoretical implications for the practice of public relations.

The Social Network Effect The Determinants of Giving Through Social Media

Social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Crowdrise offer new ways for nonprofits to engage the community in fundraising efforts. This study employs data from Facebook Causes to examine the nature and determinants of charitable giving in social networking environments. Our findings suggest donations on these sites are not driven by the same factors as in “off-line” settings. Instead, a social network effect takes precedence over traditional economic explanations. Facebook donors do not seem to care about efficiency ratios, their donations are typically small, and fundraising success is related not to the organization’s financial capacity but to its “Web capacity.” Moreover, online donors are prone to contribute to certain categories of causes more than others, especially those related to health. Given the growth in social media-driven fundraising—and the increase in crowdfunding, slacktivism, impulse donating, and other new practices this entails—these findings carry notable theoretical and practical implications.

Voice-In, Voice-Out: Constituent Participation and Nonprofit Advocacy

How do participatory constituent practices affect the scope and intensity of nonprofit advocacy? In this study, we examine this question through survey data from a random sample of charitable nonprofit organizations in Arizona in 2007. Our findings show that the scope and intensity of nonprofit advocacy tend to increase with constituent board membership, communication with constituents, and level of constituent involvement in strategic decision making. However, the scope and intensity of nonprofit advocacy tends to decrease with increased government funding and private contributions. These findings suggest important implications for organizations wishing to be more effective in influencing public policy.

The Determinants of Voluntary Financial Disclosure by Nonprofit Organizations

Encouraging organizations to be more open has been a key issue in contemporary debates over nonprofit accountability. However, our understanding of what motivates organizations to the disclosure decision is weak. We aim to enhance our understanding of this critical issue by developing and testing a model of the determinants of voluntary disclosure decision making, using data gathered on the population of not-for-profit medical institutions in Taiwan during a period where the government encouraged—but did not require—disclosure on a centralized website. As a result, we are able to conduct a “natural experiment” of the voluntary disclosure behavior of an important population of non-donor-dependent organizations. We find voluntary disclosure is more likely in organizations that are smaller, have lower debt/asset ratios, and are run by larger boards with more inside members. Our data suggest that, from a policy perspective, voluntary disclosure regimes are not an especially effective means of promoting public accountability.