Unfolding crowd‐based accountability of a charity fund during the war

Abstract

Charity organizations’ accountability is crucial for their work and existence, as these organizations depend on continuous public donations. Meeting the needs of all stakeholders places additional challenges on charities and forces them to use different ways/forms of accountability. Recently, social media (SM) has been extensively used for both charity fundraising and reporting/accountability. With few exceptions, the current literature describes this process as rather one‐sided—where charity organizations pursue their agendas without engaging with or responding to crowds accessing their SM. This research uses netnographic and interview data to investigate how public SM engagement reconfigures a charity's accountability during wartime. We utilize the case of a significant Ukrainian charity fund that gathered over USD 110 million in donations in 2022 via SM to meet the needs of that country's army as well as victims of Russia's War in Ukraine. SM enabled crowds to question and critique the fund's accountability, generating a crowd‐based accountability dialog which required the charity to respond. Consequently, the charity evolved dialogic accountability processes between the crowd, the fund and its celebrity founder, the latter playing a mediating role in the fund's dialog with the crowd. This study adds to the literature on online publics and crowd‐based accountability as dialog. A particularly significant facet of this study concerns the highly sensitized context where, despite the exigencies faced, donors’ expectations of accountability remain high. Charity organizations, other nongovernmental organizations and governments can learn from this use of SM as a crowd‐based accountability tool to enable real dialog during significant crises (in our case, Russia's War in Ukraine).