The Impact of Social Media on Charitable Giving for Nonprofit Organization

What the paper says

Research has extensively studied nonprofit organizations’ use of social media for communications and interactions with supporters. However, there has been limited research examining the impact of social media on charitable giving. This research attempts to address the gap by empirically examining the relationship between the use of social media and charitable giving for nonprofit organizations. We employ a data set of the Nonprofit Times’ top 100 nonprofits ranked by total revenue for the empirical analysis. As measures for social media traction, i.e., how extensively nonprofits draw supporters on their social media sites, we use Facebook Likes, Twitter Followers, and Instagram Followers. Our base model estimates charitable giving influenced by social media traction while controlling other variables such as total assets and industry. We extend the base model by incorporating the economic model of giving proposed by Weisbrod and Dominguez (1986). This research sheds light on the literature on the use of IT for charitable giving in the nonprofit sector by adding new knowledge on the impact of social media. It examines different social media platforms by employing such social media traction measures as Facebook Likes and Twitter and Instagram Followers, which have little been investigated in previous research.