Nonprofits, Social Media, and Mission

ABSTRACT

Characteristics core to the nonprofit sector’s identity – community building and authenticity – are what drive user engagement on microvlogging platforms like TikTok. Yet, nonprofits are often hesitant to join emerging social media platforms, especially platforms that necessitate a new content style. This hesitancy is due to uncertainties on the platform and insufficient resources to go “all-in.” We interviewed social media coordinators and applied qualitative summative content analysis to illuminate TikTok’s early adopters’ strategies for moving beyond metrics like follower counts and attention to leveraging their social media-based social capital toward mission-oriented goals. The findings indicate that as social media strategies grow more sophisticated, nonprofits build the capacity to work toward mission fulfillment more narrowly. However, the fast-paced nature of the platform defies nonprofit’ commonly reserved approach to social media, such as long-term planning, strong leadership oversight, and brand establishment. Well-meaning CEOs should focus on investing financial resources into content creation rather than controlling content.

KEYWORDS:

• Microvlogs
• nonprofits
• social capital
• social media
• social media adoption
• TikTok

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though X is currently the name of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, when this research (as well as the research cited) was conducted, it was known as Twitter. Therefore, throughout the paper, we will refer to the platform as Twitter/X for consistency.

2. We conducted the interviews in Summer 2021 regarding the nonprofits’ TikTok activity from July 2020 to March 2021. TikTok account status, including verification and follower counts, was collected in June 2021 at the time of the interviews.

3. In a related project, the research team analyzed 20 TikToks from each nonprofit’s account. While the TikTok data is not part of this analysis, the data was used to familiarize the interviewer with the nonprofit’s online activity. See Wiley et al. (2023) and DeMasters et al. (2024) for a full methodological description of how TikTok posts were collected, analyzed via textual analysis, and paired with interview data.

4. At the time of data collection in 2021–2022, TikTok’s user-base was disproportionally composed of Gen Z (Auxier & Anderson, 2021). Given that nonprofits prioritized Facebook and Twitter/X at that time, TikTok provided an uncharted space to explore messaging for this audience, which the interviewees described as future donors.