Abstract
Most non-profits maintain a social media presence with the hope to increase their popularity and achieve goals, such as to collect donations or recruit volunteers. While there is a strong vibe about the popularity of social media, there is very little empirical evidence on whether and how nonprofits can benefit from social media participation. We propose a method to quantify and assess the relationship between public social media attention and the amount of donations non-profits receive as a measure of success. We aim to address an essential limitation of prior research which has focused on studying the impact of social media on non-profits in isolation. To do so, we conducted a study of the Facebook participation of 76 non-profit organizations in Chile. Our results highlight factors that contribute to competition for public attention and show at what level social media attention relates to donation support.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
http://www.alexa.com/topsites Last retrieved on May 17th, 2018.
- 2.
https://non-profits.fb.com/ Last retrieved on Jul 15th, 2016.
- 3.
https://developers.facebook.com/ Last retrieved on January 27th, 2016.
- 4.
The proportion of likes and comments were both highly correlated to the number of posts; therefore, we decided to keep only the number of posts in our analysis.
References
Grau, S.L., Folse, J.A.G.: Cause-related marketing (CRM): the influence of donation proximity and message-framing cues on the less-involved consumer. J. Advert. 36(4), 19–33 (2007)
Guo, C., Saxton, G.D.: Tweeting social change: how social media are changing nonprofit advocacy. Nonprofit Volunt. Sect. Q. 43, 57–79 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764012471585
Hou, Y., Lampe, C.: Social media effectiveness for public engagement: example of small nonprofits. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 3107–3116. ACM (2015)
Kanter, B., Fine, A.: The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change. Wiley, Hoboken (2010)
Lovejoy, K., Saxton, G.D.: Information, community, and action: how nonprofit organizations use social media. J. Comput. Mediat. Commun. 17(3), 337–353 (2012)
Mansfield, H.: Social Media for Social Good: A How-to Guide for Nonprofits. McGraw Hill Professional, New York (2011)
Mathos, M., Norman, C.: 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits: A Field Guide. Wiley, Hoboken (2012)
McPherson, J.M., Rotolo, T.: Testing a dynamic model of social composition: diversity and change in voluntary groups. Am. Sociol. Rev. 61, 179–202 (1996)
Saxton, G.D., Waters, R.D.: What do stakeholders like on facebook? Examining public reactions to nonprofit organizations’ informational, promotional, and community-building messages. J. Public Relat. Res. 26(3), 280–299 (2014)
Thrall, A.T., Stecula, D., Sweet, D.: May we have your attention please? Human-rights NGOs and the problem of global communication. Int. J. Press Polit. 19, 160–180 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161213519132
Waters, R.D., Burnett, E., Lamm, A., Lucas, J.: Engaging stakeholders through social networking: how nonprofit organizations are using facebook. Public Relat. Rev. 35(2), 102–106 (2009)
Waters, R.D., Jamal, J.Y.: Tweet, tweet, tweet: a content analysis of nonprofit organizations’ twitter updates. Public Relat. Rev. 37(3), 321–324 (2011)
Xu, W.W., Chiu, I.H., Chen, Y., Mukherjee, T.: Twitter hashtags for health: applying network and content analyses to understand the health knowledge sharing in a twitter-based community of practice. Qual. Quant. 49(4), 1361–1380 (2015)
Acknowledgements
This work was partially funded by CONICYT Chile, under grant Conicyt-Fondecyt Iniciación 11161026.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
A Appendix
A Appendix
See Fig. 7.
List of keywords associated with each cluster of non-profit organization, in Spanish and English. The numbers in each cell indicate the distribution of the keyword for that cluster
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Farzan, R., López, C. (2018). Assessing Competition for Social Media Attention Among Non-profits. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01128-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01129-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)