Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations
This research addresses the problem of social media adoption for nonprofit organizations, but it is incremental as it applies an existing model to new data without introducing novel methods.
This study tackled the problem of understanding what drives nonprofit organizations to adopt and use social media by developing a model based on strategy, capacity, governance, and environment, and found that all these factors influence adoption, frequency of use, and dialogue outcomes.
This study examines what drives organizational adoption and use of social media through a model built around four key factors - strategy, capacity, governance, and environment. Using Twitter, Facebook, and other data on 100 large US nonprofit organizations, the model is employed to examine the determinants of three key facets of social media utilization: 1) adoption, 2) frequency of use, and 3) dialogue. We find that organizational strategies, capacities, governance features, and external pressures all play a part in these social media adoption and utilization outcomes. Through its integrated, multi-disciplinary theoretical perspective, this study thus helps foster understanding of which types of organizations are able and willing to adopt and juggle multiple social media accounts, to use those accounts to communicate more frequently with their external publics, and to build relationships with those publics through the sending of dialogic messages.