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Tracing Nonprofit Advocacy and Discursive Influence on Social Media
Moving on to the online playing field, the third stream of my research examines various mechanisms of public engagement and advocacy to impact public policy. Earlier scholarship on foundation strategy has explored the unequal power that donors exercise or the so-called donor control, yet less attention has been given to the dyadic ties with the public. Public engagement is critical for foundations to democratize control, placing greater power and voice with community stakeholders they intend to benefit. In my article, “ Beyond Policy Patrons,” published in Public Management Review (Wu, 2023), I conceptualized how foundations engage the public in policy change and advocacy on Twitter through four mechanisms—Mobilization, Advocacy, Dialogue, and Education (‘MADE’). I analyzed stakeholders and message contents of more than 16,000 tweets collected from 299 Twitter accounts of U.S. community foundations during two 12-month periods. In a related paper, “ Exploring Donor Influence and Public Engagement,” published with Voluntas, I investigated how strong donor influence might affect the thematic patterns of public engagement messages on Twitter using structural topic modeling, an unsupervised machine learning technique.
In another line of work, “ Who Leads and Who Echoes?” (Wu & Xu, 2023) recently published in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, my collaborator and I traced the message diffusion networks of climate action and contrarian nonprofits on Twitter (now “X”). Social media offer a very noisy information environment, and it is difficult to ascertain who leads a climate discourse and how the messages might diffuse across stakeholders. Adjudicating the question of message diffusion on Twitter is theoretically crucial for expanding the nonprofit advocacy literature. It is empirically intriguing, requiring a mixed methods approach that combines computational text analysis, network analysis, and stakeholder analysis to address the research problem. Notable findings come from this approach. Our analyses showed that while anti-groups might not be frequent tweeters, their voices seem highly reciprocal and diffused on Twitter. Relatively high semantic similarities between messages originating from climate contrarian nonprofits and bot-like accounts are uncovered. This paper demonstrates methodological innovation and generates exciting theoretical insights into the roles of nonprofit conversation leaders in climate discourse.
Extending on the place dilemma paper, my team (with Chao Guo and Ji Ma) is finishing up an externally funded research project that analyzes philanthropic gaps across American communities, particularly the extent to which local nonprofit sectors serving disadvantaged, minority and rural communities might “lock in” the path of “philanthropic desert” over time. Our findings illuminate the “Matthew Effect in American Generosity”—a self-reinforcing process reproducing disparities across space and time. We have developed multiple national panel datasets of local nonprofit sectors from 2000 to 2020 and found evidence for consistently lower philanthropy capacity in poor, minority, and rural communities over time. Additionally, government funding moderates the relationship between community disadvantage and philanthropic capacity. The study makes a significant theoretical and empirical contribution to advancing research in the philanthropic gaps and won the RGK-ARNOVA President’s Research Award and an award from the Generosity Commission.
Publications
Wu, V. C. S. (2021). Community leadership as multi‐dimensional capacities: A conceptual framework and preliminary findings for community foundations. Nonprofit Management and Leadership, 32(1), 29-53.
Wu, V. C. S. (2021, in press). Beyond policy patrons: A ‘MADE’ framework for examining public engagement efforts of philanthropic foundations on Twitter. Public Management Review.
Wu, V. C. S. (2022, in press). Exploring donor influence and public engagement: Computational and thematic analyses of social media messages. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations.
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