research-article

Rethinking measurements of social media use by charities: a mixed methods approach

Authors:

Christopher Phethean,

Thanassis Tiropanis,

Lisa HarrisAuthors Info & Claims

WebSci '13: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference

Pages 296 - 305

https://doi.org/10.1145/2464464.2464497

Published: 02 May 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Increasingly, the utilisation of social media services are helping charities continue to operate, as they provide unique opportunities of low-cost, easily targeted and viral marketing that have never been seen before to this scale. However, without knowing exactly how and why they are being used, analysis of their performance that could be used to indicate areas of improvement will continue to be insufficient. An innovative mixed methods approach was followed in order to address the issue, and this paper presents the results of a study that sought to determine the reasons why charities use social media, and the strategies they employ in an attempt to succeed. Three main contributions are presented -- firstly, by combining the qualitative and quantitative data it was discovered that social media are currently intended to be used primarily as relationship building tools, with little focus on fundraising; secondly, an overview of how successful charities perceive social media to be is shown and methods of measurement are mapped to a previously designed framework; and thirdly, future requirements for revising the measurement framework are discussed, demonstrating the importance of this work for grounding future developments.

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Cited By

Hasan MAfrin TMisra V(2023)Microcharity: a promising alternative to microcredit for poverty alleviationJournal of Strategy and Management10.1108/JSMA-03-2023-005318:1(9-31)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/JSMA-03-2023-0053
Li YVoida A(2022)Nonprofit Organizations’ Dialogic Use of Social Media: Principles and PracticeJournal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing10.1080/10495142.2022.213305936:1(65-90)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/10495142.2022.2133059
Ahn JSura SAn J(2018)Intention to donate via social network sites (SNSs)Information Technology & People10.1108/ITP-12-2015-030731:4(910-926)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-12-2015-0307
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Rethinking measurements of social media use by charities: a mixed methods approach
1. Applied computing
  1. Enterprise computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

WebSci '13: Proceedings of the 5th Annual ACM Web Science Conference

May 2013

481 pages

ISBN:9781450318891

DOI:10.1145/2464464

Conference Chairs:
Hugh Davis
University of Southampton
,
Harry Halpin
World Wide Web Consortium
,
Alex Pentland,
Program Chairs:
Mark Bernstein,
Lada Adamic,
Harith Alani,
Alexandre Monnin,
Richard Rogers

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 02 May 2013

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University of Southampton

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WebSci '13: Web Science 2013

May 2 - 4, 2013

Paris, France

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Overall Acceptance Rate 245 of 933 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Hasan MAfrin TMisra V(2023)Microcharity: a promising alternative to microcredit for poverty alleviationJournal of Strategy and Management10.1108/JSMA-03-2023-005318:1(9-31)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/JSMA-03-2023-0053
Li YVoida A(2022)Nonprofit Organizations’ Dialogic Use of Social Media: Principles and PracticeJournal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing10.1080/10495142.2022.213305936:1(65-90)Online publication date: 12-Oct-2022
https://doi.org/10.1080/10495142.2022.2133059
Ahn JSura SAn J(2018)Intention to donate via social network sites (SNSs)Information Technology & People10.1108/ITP-12-2015-030731:4(910-926)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1108/ITP-12-2015-0307
Sura SAhn JLee O(2017)Factors influencing intention to donate via social network site (SNS)Telematics and Informatics10.1016/j.tele.2016.04.00734:1(164-176)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.tele.2016.04.007
Lee Y(2017)Is your church “liked” on Facebook? Social media use of Christian congregations in the United StatesNonprofit Management and Leadership10.1002/nml.2129128:3(383-398)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2017
https://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21291
Phethean CTiropanis THarris LDe Roure DBurnap PHalford S(2015)Assessing the Value of Social Media for OrganisationsProceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference10.1145/2786451.2786457(1-9)Online publication date: 28-Jun-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2786451.2786457
Gurman TEllenberger N(2015)Reaching the Global Community During Disasters: Findings From a Content Analysis of the Organizational Use of Twitter After the 2010 Haiti EarthquakeJournal of Health Communication10.1080/10810730.2015.101856620:6(687-696)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2015
https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2015.1018566
Phethean CTiropanis THarris L(2015)Engaging with Charities on Social Media: Comparing Interaction on Facebook and TwitterInternet Science10.1007/978-3-319-18609-2_2(15-29)Online publication date: 2015
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-18609-2_2
Phethean CTiropanis THarris LMenczer FHendler JDutton WStrohmaier MMeyer ECattuto C(2014)Taking the relationship to the next levelProceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science10.1145/2615569.2615648(271-272)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2615569.2615648

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