Full length articleCyber-volunteering: Social media affordances in fulfilling NGO social missions
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Cyber-volunteering or online volunteering has become a popular phenomenon with the advent of technology, especially with the mass usage of social media. Cyber-volunteering is defined as an activity performed freely by an individual to work for an organization that is conducted remotely via the Internet (virtually) rather than being onsite to complete a task (Klotz, 2007, Waters, 2009). The spread of new media has also significantly increased nongovernmental organization's (NGO) ability to communicate with clients (Waters, 2007). As a result, NGO interactions have become more effective, widespread, and multifaceted and have become critical to organizational performance (Lovejoy & Saxton, 2012). Today, NGOs have leveraged social media to reach the desired audience. Many NGOs are currently active in Facebook and other social media such as Twitter and Instagram to promote, disseminate, and share information and news about their activities and missions.
Our exploratory aim of this study is not particularly focusing on the features of social media but rather its usage afforded by those features within social media (Majchrzak, Markus, & Wareham, 2012). Currently, there is substantial literature discussing NGO usage of social media related to features (Klotz, 2007, Waters, 2009) and affordances of social media in the context of enterprise organization (Leonardi, 2013, Zammuto et al., 2007). Therefore, it is considered a significant contribution to address affordance issues related to social media in the context of NGO settings and how these affordances influence cyber-volunteering activities and behavior. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze the applicability of enterprise organization social media affordances in the context of Islamic NGOs addressing education in Malaysia. This paper begins with the discussion of the NGO working behavior, how social media help their cyber-volunteering activities, and the relationship of affordance in cyber-volunteering in the introduction section. These preliminary discussions will support the development of the research questions. Subsequently, the research methodology section is discussed followed by the results and discussion section. This paper also discusses the research implications and future research before concluding it with conclusion and future work of the research in the final section.
An NGO is an organization that is established to provide benefit to the general public through advocacy and services (Bendaña, 2006, United-Nation, 2004). The term NGO is also associated with other terms, such as nonprofit organizations, social movements, and civil society organizations. In this paper, an NGO is considered a voluntary association of a group of individuals bound together to pursue shared missions and goals (Waters, 2009). Its working behavior relates to the characteristics, work customs, and actions associated with the functional purpose of establishing the organization (Bendaña, 2006, Earle, 2004, Lawry, 2009, Nah and Saxton, 2012, Waters, 2009). An NGO activity usually falls within one of the following four categories: (i) development of project concepts, (ii) project preparation, (iii) project execution, and (iv) feedback or monitoring. Although the setting is similar to an enterprise organization, there is one major difference that relates to intention and expectations. For example, a manager in an enterprise organization would stress completion of a project to the employees involved. Employees can be expected to take the task seriously since their jobs may be at stake if they do not act in accordance with their manager's expectations. However, in an NGO setting, a manager must behave in the most diplomatic manner, inviting volunteers within the organization to work together to achieve completion of a social project. Volunteers are not bound to the task if they think that they cannot commit to the job because of other personal priorities.
Additionally, NGO activities across the world can vary in response to multiple cultural contexts, as cross-cultural social psychological studies have shown (Cinnirella & Green, 2007). Western societies might be more concerned with environmental, women's, and human rights issues (Diani, 2000), while in middle and south eastern societies, activities might be related to religious beliefs, for example, Islamic faith related to solving social problems including poverty, debt, a lack of liberty, faith, or morality (Ali and Hatta, 2014, Petersen, 2012, Yasmin et al., 2013).
The terms social media, social networking application, and mobile messenger have been in circulation for a number of years. Inconsistencies in the usage of social media as social network such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and YouTube (Gao et al., 2011, Leonardi et al., 2013) and as mobile messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Tweetbots, Hangouts, and Vine (Gil, 2013) within the context of smartphones, lead us to adopt the term social media in this paper as the general terminology for all social software applications including not only the sites mentioned but also all related sites in the context of Web 2.0 technology. There are many tasks that can be performed via social media, including educational activities (Mao, 2014), buying and selling products or services (Andzulis et al., 2012, Dewan and Ramaprasad, 2014), and consultation and information sharing (Alberghini et al., 2014, Vromen et al., 2015).
Social media allow users to create and participate in virtual communities where they provide functions of sharing, communicating, publishing, managing, collaborating, and interacting with a click of a button among NGO members or the general public (Nah & Saxton, 2012). They have the ability to connect people and disseminate information interactively (Carrera et al., 2008, Crawford, 2009). They afford individualized and collective groups to communicative through virtual interaction to create visibility (Leonardi, 2013). Social media usage also saves NGOs operating cost, another important reason for NGOs to adopt the technology given their often limited monetary resources (Seltzer and Mitrook, 2007, Waters et al., 2009). Waters (2009) and Nah and Saxton (2012) also found that NGOs adopt social media for activities related to fundraising and volunteering efforts. As a result of these advantages, social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become popular within and outside the NGO context. Facebook and Twitter have surpassed one billion and 284 million registered user accounts, respectively (Kemp, 2015). In contrast, short message service has shown usage decline in the global market (Chavin et al., 2012, Tyson and Cooper, 2001).
Affordance can be defined as the perceived and actual properties of objects that determine how they could be used (Norman, 2002). Norman (2002) definition of affordance was based on Gibson (1977) theory of how animals perceive their environment. In the context of humans and technology, he categorized affordances as physical, logical, cultural, and semantic, relating to physical properties, functional properties, allowable actions in social situations, and meanings of actions, respectively. However, it is useful to further elaborate these affordances according to contemporary views such as those of Zammuto et al., 2007, Leonardi, 2013, Treem and Leonardi, 2012, and Cabiddu, Carlo, and Picolli (2014).
In the context of enterprise organization, Zammuto et al. (2007) elaborate five types of affordance that can lead to different types of organization These include visualizing entire work processes (Foverskov & Binder, 2011), real-time/flexible product and service innovation (Lewis, 2005), virtual collaboration (Foster et al., 2001, Zhang et al., 2011), mass collaboration (Joyce et al., 2012, Pettersen, 2014), and simulation/synthetic reality (Lopez-Rojas and Axelsson, 2012, Pohanka et al., 2011). Leonardi (2013) adds to the list affordances that relate to users of technology in enterprises as being individualized, collective, and shared, i.e., individual involvement in enacting a task (Rasia, Hautakangas, & Väyrynen, 2015), collective involvement to achieve an objective through similar technology by performing specialized tasks, and sharing nonindependent task using different technology to achieve an objective (Cram, Kuswara, & Richards, 2008). Although these affordances are based on the enterprise context, the extendibility of some of these affordances in the context of NGO cyber-volunteering through social media might also be relevant. For example, virtual collaboration in terms of sharing and integrating knowledge virtually; mass collaboration of many-to-many interactions; synthetic representation ability to conduct what-if scenarios (Zammuto et al., 2007); and individualized, shared, and collective usage affordances (Leonardi, 2013) are all considered to be relevant to the social media context. Additionally, there are several social media affordances already highlighted in the literature in relation to enterprise organization, including visibility: making information easily viewed or the person's knowledge visible (Cross et al., 2003, Stenmark and Zaffar, 2014, Zhang et al., 2010), editability: modify work before presentation (Dennis et al., 2008, Stenmark and Zaffar, 2014), persistence: remaining accessible in the same form as in the original display (Cabiddu et al., 2014, Stenmark and Zaffar, 2014), and association: connection between actors, content, and presentation (Salvi et al., 2012, Stenmark and Zaffar, 2014, Treem and Leonardi, 2012). In terms of customer engagement affordances through social media, customized (preference influence) and triggered (prompted initiatives) affordances are also discussed by Cabiddu et al. (2014). Table 1 provides a summary of these affordance definitions.
However, some of these affordance concepts can be seen to overlap with each other: mass collaboration by Zammuto et al. (2007), collective and shared by Leonardi (2013), and association by Treem and Leonardi (2012) can be considered simply as collective affordances, while individualized affordance by Leonardi (2013) and customized and triggered by Cabiddu et al. (2014) can be considered as individualized affordances. Thus, as we proceed, further discussions will be based on the following seven affordances: visibility, editability, persistence, virtual collaboration, synthetic representation, individualized, and collective.
This study was conducted based on the objective of discussing voluntary behavior in fulfilling NGO social missions through social media affordances. As discussed in 1.3, we concluded that there are 12 affordances concepts, as summarized in Table 1. However, the research questions were developed based on the seven selected affordances, as justified in 1.3. Hence, we adopted affordance theory to understand how social media relate to voluntary behavior within identified NGOs addressing education as part of their social mission. As the main aim of this research was to analyze social media affordances relating to cyber-volunteering in NGO working behavior, we embark on a qualitative research methodology using semi-structured interviews for in-depth studies of behavior among NGOs interacting in cyberspace using Facebook and WhatsApp. Data was analyzed using thematic coding based on the seven key affordances highlighted by Leonardi, 2013, Treem and Leonardi, 2012, and Zammuto et al. (2007). Section 2.5 provides extensive explanations of the methodological approach for the study. Based on the research objective mentioned earlier, we develop below research questions to help us design the research and thereby achieve the study objective. The research questions are as below:
RQ1: What are the social media affordances associated with voluntary behavior in NGO social missions?
RQ2: What are the cyber-volunteering activities related to social media affordances?
RQ3: How have social media affordances influenced voluntary behavior in fulfilling NGO social missions?
Section snippets
Participants
The participants were recruited from seven selected Islamic NGOs representing social missions that address Islamic education. While there were some participants from international Islamic NGOs, most participants were from NGOs based in Malaysia. The participants consisted of the top management and volunteers of the NGOs. The majority of the participants were female (20 female and 5 male), with a mean age of 33.6 years (SD = 11.07; range: 20–58). A majority of the participants had received
Results
As mentioned earlier, the focus of this paper lies in seven affordances determined based on literature, visibility, editability, persistence, virtual collaboration, collective, synthetic representation, and individualized.
From these seven affordances, we found two main themes that refer to NGO working behavior: (i) social media features and (ii) social media usage. Related activities and the trend in voluntary behavior were categorized relating to the seven identified affordances (from previous
Discussion
In this paper, we explored the cyber-volunteering behavior through social media affordances in fulfilling NGO social mission. From the exploration, we found that seven affordances concepts can be associated with NGOs behavior through social media. The seven affordance concepts were derived from the enterprise organization context, which are visibility, editability, persistence, virtual collaboration, synthetic representation, individualized, and collective (Foster et al., 2001, Foverskov and
Implications
When NGO engage in cyber-volunteering via the social media, their working behavior is afforded through seven enterprise organization affordances. Through this exploration, the results and discussions lead to several implications. First, social media features might be lacking in terms of affordance for virtual collaboration and synthetic representation. It could also mean that although NGO members are keen on using social media for their benefit, the features might not seem to afford virtual
Limitations
This exploratory study employed a convenient sampling for data collection purposes. The participants were from selected NGOs, including the NGOs' top management and volunteers. Each selected NGO in this study addressed social missions that are related to education. Most of these NGOs did not fully utilize social media as a medium for conducting classes, although a majority of them reported that they provide ICT training related to their missions. The NGOs selected were mostly residents in
Conclusion and future research
This study was qualitative in nature and was aimed at identifying cyber-volunteering behavior in NGOs through social media affordances. There are many studies relating social media affordance to enterprise organization, but these are very limited in relation to NGOs' cyber-volunteering behavior. Thus, it can be considered important and very useful to identify the extendibility of affordance theory, adopted from enterprise organization in the NGO context. The cyber-volunteering behaviors were
Funding sources
We would like to express our sincere thanks to High Impact Research Grant (J-11001-73869) and University Malaya Research Grant (RP004B-13HNE) of University of Malaya for funding.
Acknowledgments
We also would like to express our gratitude to individual who are involve in this study such as Jananatul Akmal Muhd Talib, Siti Faridah Abdul Samad, Khairunnisa Ismail, Samiah Abdullah, Noor Jamaliah Ibrahim, Abdullatiff Ahmadi Ramchahi, Mutasem Am Ali, and Irnawati Amusin. The authors would also like to thank Enago (www.enago.com) for the English language review and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper.
References (59)
- et al.
Social media affordances: enabling customer engagement
Annals of Tourism Research
(2014) - et al.
Does ‘cyber-conformity’ vary cross-culturally? Exploring the effect of culture and communication medium on social conformity
Computers in Human Behavior
(2007) - et al.
Can Facebook be used to increase scientific literacy? A case study of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Facebook page and ocean literacy
Computers & Education
(2015) - et al.
Harnessing the crowdsourcing power of social media for disaster relief
IEEE Intelligent Systems
(2011) Social media for learning: a mixed methods study on high school students' technology affordances and perspectives
Computers in Human Behavior
(2014)- et al.
The dialogic potential of weblogs in relationship building
Public Relations Review
(2007) - et al.
Engaging stakeholders through social networking: how nonprofit organizations are using Facebook
Public Relations Review
(2009) - et al.
Typical virtual appliances: an optimized mechanism for virtual appliances provisioning and management
The Journal of Systems and Software
(2011) - et al.
A methodology to manage and monitor social media inside a company: a case study
Journal of Knowledge Management
(2014) - et al.
Zakat as a poverty reduction mechanism among the Muslim community: case study of Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia
Asian Social Work and Policy Review
(2014)