Sarah Ford | June 17, 2014

Increased social network can have big payoff for nonprofits, study shows

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Charitable fundraising once depended primarily upon a charity’s size, efficiency and longstanding reputation. That was before Razoo, Kickstarter, Facebook and Twitter came to town.  

In the first academic study to look at what determines charitable giving on social-media sites, researchers found that those media have created a more level playing field in the nonprofit world, one in which successful use of technology can make up for limited organizational size.

Technology and social media, it turns out, can not only raise the online profile of even small organizations, but increase their support bases and their ability to generate donations online and off.

That is among the findings of “The Social Network Effect: Determinants of Giving Through Social Media,” a study by Gregory Saxton, associate professor in the University at Buffalo Department of Communication, and Lili Wang, assistant professor of nonprofit studies in the Arizona State University School of Community Resources and Development.

It was published online in the current issue of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.

“This paper is innovative in several ways,” Saxton says. “It is the first to look at the predictors of donations in a social media setting.  It also appears to be the first study of donations on a crowdfunding platform. Furthermore, it examines variables the ‘traditional’ studies have ignored — the size of the organization’s social network and the organization’s ‘Web capacity.’

>> Continue Reading

Get Resources and Insights Straight To Your Inbox

Explore More Articles

Productive Partnerships: Supporting Nonprofits Through CSR Initiatives, hosted by NXUnite by Nexus Marketing

Productive Partnerships: Supporting Nonprofits Through CSR Initiatives

October 21, 2024

Join America’s Charities President and CEO, Jim Starr, along with other panelists on October 30, 2024 at 3:00 PM ET for NXUnite’s panel on Productive…

Read Article

Animal Rescue Team and Disaster Response

September 30, 2024

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) Animal Rescue Team (ART) is on call 24/7, ready to deploy whenever animals are caught in large-scale…

Read Article

Domestic Violence Awareness Month: Together We Can End Domestic Abuse

September 24, 2024

The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are victims of physical violence by a partner every year. People who are…

Read Article

Get Resources and Insights Straight To Your Inbox

Receive our monthly/bi-monthly newsletter filled with information about causes, nonprofit impact, and topics important for corporate social responsibility and employee engagement professionals, including disaster response, workplace giving, matching gifts, employee assistance funds, volunteering, scholarship award program management, grantmaking, and other philanthropic initiatives.

newsletter-mock