Social Media and Social Service: Are Nonprofits Plugged In to the Digital Age?

Social media has become ubiquitous in everyday life as well as a part of many organizational cultures and communications plans. However, in the nonprofit sector, in which technology adaption has historically been slower than the corporate sector, social media use is less pervasive. This qualitative study used a Template Analysis approach to explore social media use across a sample of nonprofit human service organizations. Twenty senior leaders participated in interviews, focusing on how their organization used social media, the effects of using electronic communications tools, and the enhancers and barriers to social media use. Four themes emerged from the analysis of the interview data: social media supports, resources, obstacles, and experiential. In addition to those themes, a classification system emerged based on Brandtzaeg’s media user typology. The author discusses practice implications and considers directions for future research.

[1]  Richard D. Waters,et al.  Engaging stakeholders through social networking: How nonprofit organizations are using Facebook , 2009 .

[2]  Gregory D. Saxton,et al.  Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations , 2012, New Media Soc..

[3]  John G. McNutt,et al.  Electronic Advocacy by Nonprofit Organizations in Social Welfare Policy , 1999 .

[4]  Maggie MacAulay,et al.  NPO 2.0? Exploring the Web Presence of Environmental Nonprofit Organizations in Canada , 2009 .

[5]  Katie Hafner,et al.  The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community , 2001 .

[6]  Susann Kluge.  Empirically Grounded Construction of Types and Typologies in Qualitative Social Research , 2000 .

[7]  J. McNutt,et al.  ELECTRONIC ADVOCACY IN POLICY PRACTICE: A FRAMEWORK FOR TEACHING TECHNOLOGICALLY BASED PRACTICE , 1999 .

[8]  D. Polkinghorne.  Language and meaning: Data collection in qualitative research. , 2005 .

[9]  L. Johnston.  Template analysis. , 1987, Journal of clinical orthodontics : JCO.

[10]  Gregory D. Saxton,et al.  The Social Network Effect , 2014 .

[11]  Gregory D. Saxton,et al.  The Determinants of Voluntary Financial Disclosure by Nonprofit Organizations , 2011 .

[12]  Social Media Fundraising: Facebook Friend or Foe? A Case Study of Oregon Nonprofit Organizations , 2010 .

[13]  S. Kemmis,et al.  Re‐thinking case study: notes from the second Cambridge Conference , 1976 .

[14]  Richard D. Waters.  Nonprofit organizations' use of the internet: A content analysis of communication trends on the internet sites of the philanthropy 400 , 2007 .

[15]  W. Olsen,et al.  Triangulation in Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods Can Really Be Mixed , 2004 .

[16]  F. Huber,et al.  Segmenting cyberspace: a customer typology for the internet , 2007 .

[17]  H. Bussell.  Qualitative Methods and Analysis in Organizational Research: A Practical Guide , 2000 .

[18]  L. Guion.  Triangulation: Establishing the Validity of Qualitative Studies , 2002 .

[19]  Lauri Goldkind,et al.  Social Media and Social Change: Nonprofits and Using Social Media Strategies to Meet Advocacy Goals , 2014 .

[20]  D. Bortree,et al.  Dialogic strategies and outcomes: An analysis of environmental advocacy groups' Facebook profiles , 2009 .

[21]  Bruno S. Silvestre,et al.  Social Media? Get Serious! Understanding the Functional Building Blocks of Social Media , 2011 .

[22]  Eric W. K. Tsang.  Case studies and generalization in information systems research: A critical realist perspective , 2014, J. Strateg. Inf. Syst..

[23]  J. McNutt.  Web 2.0 Tools for Policy Research and Advocacy , 2008 .

[24]  Andrew J. Roback.  Uncovering motives for social networking site use among practitioners at non-profit organizations , 2013, CSCW '13.

[25]  Luke Tredinnick.  Web 2.0 and Business , 2006 .

[26]  Petter Bae Brandtzæg,et al.  Towards a unified Media-User Typology (MUT): A meta-analysis and review of the research literature on media-user typologies , 2010, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[27]  Lisa Harris,et al.  Rethinking measurements of social media use by charities: a mixed methods approach , 2013, WebSci.

[28]  Gregory D. Saxton,et al.  Tweeting Social Change , 2014 .

[29]  Petter Bae Brandtzæg,et al.  A typology of social networking sites users , 2011, Int. J. Web Based Communities.

[30]  Gregory D. Saxton,et al.  Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media , 2011, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[31]  Ronald J. Chenail,et al.  Getting Specific about Qualitative Research Generalizability. , 2010 .