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Digital Civil Society: How Nigerian NGOs Utilize Social Media Platforms

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Abstract

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have the potential to contribute to a vibrant civil society and build social capital within countries, but the potential for social media to support these connections is unclear, particularly in the developing world. Building social capital requires constructing relationships between people, and social media will be most likely to accomplish this when it is used in an interactive way. Previous research has considered the issue of interactivity and social media usage in Western countries like the USA, but no research has focused on these issues within the developing world. Our paper explores the degree to which Nigerian NGOs are utilizing social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, in ways that are more interactive in nature, and thus in ways that are more likely to build robust and reciprocal relations. Utilizing a new coding scheme created by the authors and data on the use of Facebook and Twitter by 1988 Nigerian NGOs and the level of interactivity of tweets from 151 of these NGOs, we find that while few NGOs in Nigeria appear to utilize social media, those that do are more interactive in their usage than expected.

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Notes

  1. Each year, The NonProfit Times, a business publication for nonprofit management, publishes an annual study of the nation’s largest 100 nonprofits.

  2. The fact that smaller groups are likely less well represented in the study is one potential limitation and may lead to our study overestimating the number of Nigerian NGOs that utilize social media, since many of these smaller groups would also be less likely to use social media.

  3. After the initial round of coding, there was a 72.2% agreement in all cases.

  4. For more information on Ushahidi, see https://www.ushahidi.com/features.

  5. For more information on Sahana, see https://sahanafoundation.org/.

  6. For more information on Openstreetmap, see https://www.openstreetmap.org/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors contributed equally to the project and are listed in alphabetical order. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2016 Southern Political Science Association annual conference. The authors would like to thank Kenneth Rogerson, Sean Aday, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on previous versions of this paper.

Funding

This study did not receive any funding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA

    Crystal Armstrong

  2. Department of Political Science and International Affairs and School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding, and Development, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA, USA

    Charity Butcher

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  1. Crystal Armstrong
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  2. Charity Butcher
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Correspondence to Charity Butcher.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Appendix

Table 7 Twitter coding scheme
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Armstrong, C., Butcher, C. Digital Civil Society: How Nigerian NGOs Utilize Social Media Platforms. Int J Polit Cult Soc 31, 251–273 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-017-9268-4

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