The rapid diffusion of "microblogging" services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates-"information," "community," and "action." Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community-building practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media appears to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement. 
Keywords: microblogging; Twitter; social media; stakeholder relations; organizational communication; organization-public relations; nonprofit organizations

Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media

The rapid diffusion of “microblogging” services such as Twitter is ushering in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their core stakeholders and the general public. To enhance understanding of the communicative functions microblogging serves for organizations, this study examines the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest nonprofit organizations in the United States. The analysis reveals there are three key functions of microblogging updates—“information,”“community,” and “action.” Though the informational use of microblogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community-building practices than they have been with traditional websites. The adoption of social media appears to have engendered new paradigms of public engagement. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

(Authors are listed in alphabetical order. The authors would like to thank Tom Feeley, Richard Waters, Seungahn Nah, I-hsuan Chiu, Yuchao Huang, and Kenton Anderson for helpful comments and suggestions.)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01576.x

One hundred forty characters seems like too small a space for any meaningful information to be exchanged, but Twitter users have found creative ways to get the most out of each Tweet by using different communication tools. This paper looks into how 73 nonprofit organizations use Twitter to engage stakeholders not only through their tweets, but also through other various communication methods. Specifically, it looks into the organizations’ utilization of tweet frequency, following behavior, hyperlinks, hashtags, public messages, retweets, and multimedia files. After analyzing 4,655 tweets, the study found that the nation’s largest nonprofits are not using Twitter to maximize stakeholder involvement. Instead, they continue to use social media as a one-way communication channel, as less than 20% of their total tweets demonstrate conversations and roughly 16% demonstrate indirect connections to specific users.

Engaging Stakeholders Through Twitter: How Nonprofit Organizations Are Getting More Out of 140 Characters or Less

Engaging Stakeholders through Twitter: How Nonprofit Organizations are Getting More Out of 140 Characters or Less

How are nonprofit organizations utilizing social media to engage in advocacy work?   We address this question by investigating the social media use of 188 501(c)(3) advocacy organizations.   After briefly examining the types of social media technologies employed, we turn to an in-depth examination of the organizations’ use of Twitter. This in-depth message-level analysis is twofold: A content analysis that examines the prevalence of previously identified communicative and advocacy constructs in nonprofits’ social media messages; and an inductive analysis that explores the unique features and dynamics of social media-based advocacy and identifies new organizational practices and forms of communication heretofore unseen in the literature.

Tweeting Social Change: How Social Media Are Changing Nonprofit Advocacy

This paper maps the web presence of environmental nonprofit organizations (ENPOs) in Canada. It focuses upon a sample of 43 websites which were examined in April/May 2009. All of the websites belong to member organizations of the Climate Action Network-Canada, a peak ENPO with collaborative networks in the United States and Europe. Our interest is in examining the extent to which the online activities of ENPOs correspond with a ‘broadcast’ paradigm—based on the principle of one-way information flow—or a two-way ‘dialogical’ paradigm of communication. Special attention is given to addressing the use of social media technologies (Web 2.0) by these ENPOs, including Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and blogs. The findings interrogate the tension between instrumental and dialogical forms of communication. They also demonstrate that although there are cases of effective web-based communication by ENPOs, most are not leveraging the potential these technologies afford for constituency engagement, relationship building and conversation. The findings contribute to scholarship on nonprofit communication, environmental communication, social media and public relations.

Maggie MacAulay

Papers

NPO 2.0? Exploring the Web Presence of Environmental Nonprofit Organizations in Canada