Social Media and the Social Good: How Nonprofits Use Facebook to Communicate with the Public
This research addresses how nonprofits can improve public engagement through social media, offering insights for organizational communication strategies, though it is incremental in building on existing stakeholder engagement theories.
The study analyzed the Facebook usage of the top 100 U.S. nonprofits, identifying 5 categories of statuses grouped into information, community, and action dimensions, and found that nonprofits are more effective at strategic stakeholder engagement through dialogic and community-building practices on Facebook compared to traditional websites.
In this study, we examine the social networking practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. More specifically, we develop a comprehensive classification scheme to delineate these organizations' use of Facebook as a stakeholder engagement tool. We find that there are 5 primary categories of Facebook "statuses", which can be aggregated into three key dimensions - "information", "community", and "action". Our analysis reveals that, though the "informational" use of Facebook is still significant, nonprofit organizations are better at using Facebook to strategically engage their stakeholders via "dialogic" and "community-building" practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media seems to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement.