Abstract three key functions of micro-blogging updates -"information," "community," and "action." Though the informational use of micro-blogging is extensive, nonprofit organizations are better at using Twitter to strategically engage their stakeholders via dialogic and community-building practices than they have been with traditional websites. Keywords: micro-blogging; Twitter; social media; stakeholder relations; organizational communication; organization-public relations; nonprofit organizations * Authors are listed in alphabetical order. The authors would like to thank Tom Feeley, Richard Waters, Seungahn Nah, I-hsuan Chiu, Yuchao Huang, and Kenton Anderson for helpful comments and suggestions. HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 2 Prior studies (e.g., Kent, Taylor, & White, 2003; Saxton, Guo, & Brown, 2007) have shown that nonprofit organizations have not been able to use websites as strategic, interactive stakeholder engagement tools. Perhaps this was due to not having the know-how or the staff to create more interactive sites with feedback options and discussion boards. The advent of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have taken away this excuse. These sites are free and have built-in interactivity. Any organization big or small can create a site and start building a network of friends and followers with whom they are in almost real-time contact. These newer social media applications present communication opportunities that differ dramatically from organizationally supported websites. The question, is, how are organizations using micro-blogging applications? We aim here to help answer this question and understand the various functions for which organizational micro-blogging is employed via an examination of the Twitter utilization practices of the 100 largest charitable organizations in the United States. First, based on an analysis of the tweets sent by the organizations in our sample, we develop an original typology of organizational micro-blogging functions. Second, we use this information to examine the relative frequency with which organizations rely on the main types of tweets, and to then characterize the organizations themselves based on their tweet function utilization patterns. Our plan for the paper is as follows. After reviewing the literature and presenting our theoretical framework, we describe our sample and coding procedures and then turn to an examination of our findings. We end with a discussion of the core implications of our study for organizations, for civil society, and for theory. In the end, scholars will have to continue to develop new conceptual tools to understand stakeholder relations in an age dominated by social media. HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 3 Though new media have certainly not replaced more traditional communication technologies in the workplace, the digital continues to crowd out the analogue: Of 17 workplace communication technologies considered "mandatory" by 50% or more of respondents in a recent survey, ten were computer-mediated, including email, the Internet, collaboration software, wikis, and Web teleconferencing (D'Urso & Pierce, 2009). As these and newer media spread, an increasing proportion of organizational models, operations, and transactions are purely electronic (e.g., Kang & Norton, 2004) . The spread of new media has also significantly increased nonprofits' ability to communicate with clients as well as regulators, volunteers, the media, and the general public (e.g., Waters, 2007) . Through strategically targeted content, firms can mobilize stakeholders, build meaningful relationships, and ultimately foster increased accountability and public trust (Saxton & Guo, 2011) . Online nonprofit/stakeholder interactions have effectively become more and more ubiquitous, multifaceted, and critical to organizational performance. (Kent et al., 2003) , and have examined the use of websites to boost stakeholder responsiveness (Saxton, Guo, & Brown, 2007) , generate social capital (Nah, 2009), and develop strategic and interactive stakeholder communications (Hackler & Saxton, 2007; Waters, 2007) . These website studies collectively point to two broad organizational functions for new media: information and dialogue. These studies further suggest the website has become both the HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 4 "public face" of the organization and the vehicle through which intense and meaningful public interactions can take place. What the first generation of studies showed, however, was that despite the promise Web 1.0 technologies sparked to engender a more active and "dialogic" civil society, nonprofits have been unable to use the website as a strategic, interactive organizational communication and stakeholder engagement tool (e.g., Kent et al., 2003; Saxton et al., 2007) . The development of newer forms of communication technologies, such as blogs, instant messaging, and Internet Relay Chat, heralded a qualitative change in communicative potential beyond that possible through email or websites. Studies of these newer digital technologies, which could be considered "precursors" to social media, found they engendered substantially greater capabilities for collaboration, interactivity, and "polychronic" communication ( Organizations were less likely to send "me now"-type tweets, more likely to send informational messages, and more likely to try to engage their followers with messages that spurred dialogue. This study concentrates on a central feature of organizations' social media utilization-the actual messages sent. This is distinct from the other primary feature of social media applications-the inter-personal and inter-organizational network structures developed via friending and following behavior. To date, no published papers exist that attempt to code Facebook messages. As for Twitter, several attempts at tweet categorization have been made (Java et al., 2007; Naaman et al., 2010) , but none have looked at organizational applications. These studies showed that, at the individual level, the "daily chatter," or "me now," type of tweets were the most prevalent. Overall, social media appears to have created opportunities for interpersonal engagement, interactivity, and dialogue that are qualitatively different from those offered by traditional websites. It would thus be reasonable to infer that social media would similarly carry considerable potential as an organizational communication and stakeholder relations tool. However, prior research only hints at the scope and nature of stakeholder-related organizational communications made possible by the diffusion of social media. Though the more extensive HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 6 interpersonal-level social media research likely entails hypotheses that are testable at the organizational level, only the handful of preliminary studies just noted explicitly discuss how organizations use social media to communicate with their stakeholders and the general public. There is a pressing need for both relevant data and analytical frameworks that can help us understand how organizations are using microblogging to engage the public. A key insight found in the individual-level schemes noted above, in the existing organizational-level studies on website utilization (e.g., Kang & Norton, 2004; Kent et al., 2003; Waters, 2007) , and in the broad findings of the existing organizational-level social media studies (Jansen et al., 2009; Waters et al., 2009 ) is that organizations seem to employ new media for at least two primary purposes-information-sharing and dialogic relationship-building. The problem is that, broadly speaking, we do not yet have a good sense of how organizations are using social media. We do not know whether and how the information and  To address these questions, we employ both tweet-level and organizational-level analyses of 100 nonprofit organizations' use of Twitter. Twitter was launched in October 2006 and has since HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 7 become the largest micro-blogging site on the Internet, making it an excellent way to reach a large number of stakeholders with brief, easily digestible bits of information. Only messages of 140 characters or less can be sent at a time; these messages, called "tweets," are broadcast in real-time and become part of the public stream unless a user sets her tweets to a private setting. Given the novelty of social media applications as organizational communication tools, for our sampling frame we utilized a sample of large charitable organizations, which despite the low financial and technological barriers to adoption are still more likely than smaller organizations to have a significant presence on Twitter. Specifically, as in prior studies (e.g., Kang & Norton, 2004), we examined organizations from the most recent version (2008) of the "Nonprofit Times 100" list available at the start of our study period. Published annually in the NonProfit Times, the list contains the 100 largest non-educational US nonprofit organizations in terms of revenue. To make the list, at least ten percent of revenues must come from donations. To gather data on these organizations, our first step was to determine which organizations had Twitter accounts. To find active accounts, we undertook a multi-pronged search strategy during the first week of November 2009. First, we searched the organizations' websites: most of the organizations (55) had a prominent link to their Twitter account on the home page, while another 3 organizations had a link to a Twitter account on a sub-page of the website. To find the accounts of the remaining organizations, we conducted a search on both Google (e.g., "Twitter Boy Scouts The classification scheme we developed was informed by previous individual-level social media coding schemes, prior blog classification studies (e.g., Macias et al. 2009) , and the new media and stakeholder engagement literatures. Building on prior research, we thus began deductively with the assumption that we would likely find informational and dialogic forms of HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 9 communication in our sample of organizations. However, ultimately, the codes were developed via an inductive process based on a review of tweets from a sample of nonprofit organizations in the month prior to our data-gathering period (October 2009). Our database contained the 4,655 tweets sent between November 8 and December 7, 2009 by the 73 organizations with Twitter accounts. Given the large number of tweets, the decision was made to code a subset-the 2,437 tweets sent over the first two weeks of the study. Both authors began by coding the first 100 tweets using the 12-category scheme shown in Table 1 ; each tweet was assigned a single code from this scheme. In cases where a tweet appeared to serve dual purposes, codes were assigned according to what was considered the tweet's primary purpose. Discrepancies between codings were discussed and coding rules refined until 100% agreement was reached. Using the refined rules, another 100 tweets were coded with 94.0% inter-coder agreement and a Cohen's kappa score of .91, indicating a high level of inter-coder reliability. In line with our two primary research questions, our analysis of stakeholder communication on Twitter has two components. First, we examine the content of the aggregate set of tweets via our original typology of organizational micro-blogging functions. We then analyze and classify the organizations based on their relative utilization of the various micro-blogging functions. As shown in Table 1 and discussed in detail below, twelve types of tweets emerged from the coding process. Based on our inductive analysis of the data, we then grouped these categories into three major functions: Information, Community, and Action. By way of initial introduction, we might think of informing as the basic function of Twitter; this involves spreading information about the organization, its activities, or anything of potential interest to followers. The second HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 10 function, "community," taps into how organizations can foster relationships, create networks, and build communities on Twitter through tweets that promote interactivity and dialogue. The heart of this function are "dialogic" messages and those that attempt to build a community of followers via "bonding" messages, such as "thank you" and acknowledgement tweets. The third function, which we call "action," has as a central purpose the aim of getting followers to "do something" for the organization, whether it is to donate, buy a product, attend an event, join a movement, or launch a protest. Promotion and mobilization are at the heart of this function. We now turn to our analysis of the twelve specific tweet categories we developed, organized according to primary function. [Insert Table 1 here] The information function contains a single category, which covers tweets containing information about the organization's activities, highlights from events, or any other news, facts, reports or information relevant to an organization's stakeholders. In line with previous organizational website research (e.g., Saxton et al., 2007; Waters, 2007) , it involves a one-way interaction, the exchange of information from the organization to the public. Interestingly, a large proportion of tweets in this category moved beyond simple "tidbits" of information amenable to a 140-character limitation. As seen in the following example (with organization name shown in italics), many of these tweets included links to other sites where additional information could be found: NYPL: Phillip Hoose is on stage, introducing Claudette Colvin! Awesome! #nationalbook http://yfrog.com/31nc8j The main difference between this category and the others is that the tweet's primary purpose is solely to inform; there is no explicit secondary agenda, that is, the tweet does not chiefly serve to HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 11 promote an event, mobilize supporters to take some type of action, foster dialogue, or build a community. What binds these tweets in common is the simple one-way information exchange. As shown in Table 1 , most messages (59%) were classified as informational. This is consistent with prior research (Greenberg & MacAulay, 2009; Jansen et al., 2009) . While much of the literature implicitly maligns the informational function (e.g., the pejorative label "brochureware"), the effects of democratized information-sharing processes can be far-reaching. Information is a powerful tool during crises (Macias et al., 2009) , and at other times, when an organization sends information about its activities or its history, vision, or objectives, or detailed information on its finances, performance, governance policies, or ethical standards, it can connect a broad array of stakeholders to its mission and help to boost accountability and public trust. Informational tweets can also help connect an organizations' constituents to relevant resources in the community. At the same time, informational tweets serve as an essential base upon which more complex functions (e.g., dialogue and mobilization) can be built. The current literature on social media use by nonprofits shows the gap between sending out information and creating "dialogue" (e.g., Waters et al., 2009) . Although Twitter's main purpose is micro-blogging, it is also a social networking tool. Organizations can thus use Twitter to interact, share, and converse with stakeholders in a way that ultimately facilitates the creation of an online community with its followers. We label tweets that fill this function "community." There are effectively two aspects to this function: dialogue and community-building. First, there are tweets that spark direct interactive conversations between organizations and their publics; this is similar to the notion of "dialogue" in the organizational website literature (e.g., Kent et al., 2003) . Second, there are those tweets whose primary purpose is to say something that HOW NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS USE SOCIAL MEDIA 12 strengthens ties to the online community without involving an expectation of interactive conversation. This element relates to the social capital and network-building functions that Nah (2009) suggests is possible in organizational websites. We found four categories of tweets that fulfill the community function. Two of the categories, giving recognition and thanks and acknowledgment of current and local events, are primarily related to the "community-building" element, while "responding to public reply messages" and "response solicitation" are more directly associated with the "dialogue" aspect. What binds all four categories is the goal of building and engaging with a productive and healthy online community comprising the organization and its supporters. Altogether, 26% of the tweets in our sample served the dialogic and community-building function. Giving recognition and thanks. It is one of the basic tenets of nonprofit management that acknowledging and thanking donors and other supporters is essential. Messages giving such thanks accounted for 13.2% of all tweets. As typified by the following example (with
Relatedly, REF reveal that NPOs use ICTs for three primary reasons: information, community, and action.
Information, Community, and Action: How Nonprofit Organizations Use Social Media
Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, vol. 17, pp. 337-353, 2012
Psychology Computer Science