Modeling the adoption and use of social media by nonprofit organizations

By Seungahn Nah, Gregory D. Saxton. New Media & Society, 2012

421 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f50bf77ac77c14fe7ce8330eca888f15fee7dd0d

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Citations in the corpus

The Social Network Effect (2014, background): “Recent research (Nah & Saxton, 2013) also shows that specific Web capabilities can be a key determinant of how nonprofits adopt and use social media.”
Social media for knowledge-sharing: A systematic literature review (2018, background): “Social media has also become an important information channel from the perspective of work organizations, as a tool for searching for and finding available information, which evolves through collaboration between workplace employees (Nah and Saxton, 2013).”
Using social media to enhance citizen engagement with local government: Twitter or Facebook? (2018, background): “However, according to Neuman (2014), it is difficult to know whether citizens find this information useful, and this author gives some advice for creating content that generates interactivity: make it useful, entertain readers and react fast. Forrester Research (2014) reported that Facebook and Twit”