Measuring the performance of social media marketing in the charitable domain

Social media services offer a new avenue for non-profit organizations (NPOs) to initiate viral and word-of- mouth marketing. Due to the widespread adoption of these sites, there is the potential for this type of marketing to reach a large audience. The emergence of social media as a new marketing platform leads to fresh challenges in that the online nature of it creates difficulties in attributing actions of intent on social media to real, meaningful action that can help NPOs. This paper provides an interdisciplinary approach to discovering the relationship between actions on social media and the performance of NPOs’ social media marketing campaign. A framework is proposed which distinguishes, tracks and measures different stages of social media marketing activity in order to determine its success. The framework provides a number of metrics - taking into account the disciplines of computer science and management - that can be used to assess performance of NPO campaigns, and is tested on two sample charities. Future research directions for this project are then discussed