Nonprofits’ Online Social Capital and Charitable Support

ABSTRACT

Building online communities has become an important part of nonprofits’ stakeholder management, but there remains uncertainty as to whether nonprofits’ online communities have practical implications for organizational outcomes. This study examines the relationship between the size of a nonprofit’s online communities on Facebook and Twitter and the support for the organization in terms of individual donations and volunteer contributions. The analysis of the Cultural Data Profile (CDP), which contains information of nonprofit arts, culture, and humanities organizations in the U.S., reveals that the number of Facebook fans is positively associated with the amount of individual donations and full-time equivalent (FTE) volunteers. The number of Twitter followers is positively associated with individual donations, but not with FTE volunteers. Overall, the findings suggest that there is a close connection between nonprofit organizations’ online community building and charitable support and this link varies among different social media platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• charitable support
• online communities
• social capital

Notes

1. Taking logarithms of the numbers is a common practice of addressing the skewedness in the distribution of the observations. Research on nonprofit finances has adopted this approach due to the severe skewness in the distribution of dollar-term measures (e.g., revenue, expense, and asset) across organizations (Jacobs & Marudas, 2009; Marudas et al., 2014).