Nonprofit Use of Social Media: Insights from the Field

This study focuses on social media use in nonprofit organizations and how nonprofits perceive and strategize about the use of social media platforms. The study was open to any nonprofit organization actively engaged in the use of social media and fifteen different nonprofit organizations were purposefully selected for inclusion in the study. Through interviews with the social media strategists employed by the organizations, the researcher created a foundation for understanding perceptions of effective strategies for social media use in these nonprofits. While participants described a variety of social media platforms, discussion revolved primarily around the use of Facebook and Twitter. Analysis of the data resulted in the formation of six themes that included: nature of social media, online/offline action, social media is social, strategic/data driven, authentic, and power of the story. Together, these themes provide insights into how these organizations approached the use of social media. According to Kaplan and Haenlein (2010), “Social Media is a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content” (p. 61). These tools provide nonprofit organizations with opportunities for low cost and powerful connections with their stakeholders, and are especially relevant as use of social media is on the rise in both teen and adult populations (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010). At the same time, however, these connections also present new challenges and give a previously unprecedented level of control to the users (Tredinnick, 2006; Berman, Abraham, Battino, Shipnuck, & Neus, 2007). The goal of this paper is to examine how nonprofit practitioners perceive social media and strategize about the use of social media platforms. This study was open to any nonprofit actively engaged in the use of social media in an effort to understand how nonprofit use of social media might be similar or different from social media use in corporate and government organizations. To this end, the researcher investigated the following research questions. RQ1: How do nonprofit social media strategists perceive social media platforms? RQ2: What strategies do nonprofit social media strategists believe are effective for using social media?