Catherine Urquhart

Visiting professor

Social Media and Development: Understanding NGO practices and perceptions

Author

Sheombar Anand
Cathy Urquhart
Oliver Kayas
Ndhlovu Tidings

Summary, in English

The goal of this study is to identify the perspectives that development NGOs attribute to organisational social media, and furthermore elaborate on an appropriate categorisation of these perspectives for social media use by development NGOs. How social media is used in the area of development, where the use goes far beyond the private sector purpose of publicity and converting a sale, is a key issue for NGOs. Fourteen development NGOs from the Netherlands that are actively using social media were selected for this study. Interviews were conducted to collect data from the decision makers and practitioners in these organisations. The grounded theory method combined with a multiple case study was applied for data analysis. The resulting preliminary framework presents us with four emerging perspectives, namely Technological, Individual, Collective and Contextual perspectives attributed to organisational social media use. We theorise that there are relationships between these four perspectives. This paper suggests that the understanding of (organisational) social media use among development NGOs can be better understood by identifying these perspectives and their inter-relationships. The implications of these findings for the literature on affordances and organisational social media use in the context of development and NGOs are discussed.

Publishing year

2018-12-12

Language

English

Publication/Series

Proceedings of the 11th Annual Pre-ICIS SIG GlobDev Workshop : GlobDev 2018

Links

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

AIS

Topic