Ethnographies involve the exploration of social phenomena in the field, typically for an extended period of time. Traditionally, ethnographers listen to, observe, and directly communicate with the subjects of their research. At its essence, ethnography is about storytelling, and the data are collected through human interaction. With the development of new technologies, and with the plethora of social media platforms, the manner in which many stories are told has become significantly more varied. Accordingly, digital ethnography has emerged as a new approach to conducting ethnographies. In the present study, we focus specifically on the use of digital ethnographies in third sector studies. Building on our own experience using digital ethnography, collecting data from Facebook pages and groups, blogs, and websites of nonprofit organizations and individual volunteers and donors, we describe two different ways of conducting digital ethnography: One, at the micro-level, explores human milk donations to nonprofit milk banks. The second, at the meso-level, explores a community of migrant workers. We aim to outline the potential, limitations, and ethical considerations of this methodology.

In the context of China’s new law against domestic violence, proposed by the State Council in November 2014 and passed in July 2015, this article examines online engagement by Chinese citizens leading up to the legislative revision, and examines the Sina Weibo microblog activities of one influential organisation, nǚquán zhī shēng (Feminist Voice). I ask how a Chinese Civil Society Organisation (CSO) uses online media to open public discourse on, and in some cases challenge, formal and informal institutions around a normatively marginalised issue, the case of domestic violence. Drawing on and synthesising literature on domestic violence, civil society and online communications in China, this study provides a timely contribution given the relative limitedness of up-to-date data, after the huge wave of publications following the 1995 Beijing conference. Findings are based on content analysis of the Feminist Voice microblog during 2012. While Chinese CSOs are often dismissed as non-confrontational and therefore ineffective change agents, Feminist Voice does challenge status quo marginalisation of domestic violence in the public sphere and facilitate discussion around formal and informal institutional reform, thereby influencing social attitudes and potentially also policy and law making.

Poor air quality has been affecting the Chinese people for many years due to the country’s speedy industrialization and urbanization. However, very few initiatives had been taken by civil society until 2011. The air pollution campaign between October 2011 and March 2012 initiated on a Chinese microblogging website, mobilized millions of citizens and effected policy change. It is often seen as a milestone in the chronology of public participation in China. Using process tracing, participant observations, framing analysis and in-depth interviews, the article analyses this campaign by revealing its major actors and frames mobilizing issue entrepreneurs and environmental publics. Our analysis generates two findings: first, microblogging platforms can greatly expand the networks of Chinese environmental activists by involving public figures and governmental agencies; second, the frame which links air pollution to health and appreciates governmental efforts is critical to the success of civic participation in China’s environmental governance.

Its reliance on social media and television to mobilise supporters and popularise the figure of its charismatic leader, political science lecturer Pablo Iglesias, is one of the main characteristic features of Podemos, a new, left-leaning populist party that has shaken the political establishment of Spain since its irruption as a decisive political force in the 2014 European elections. Podemos could actually be defined as a ‘transmedia party’, as it combines the use of social media to reach young constituents with traditional TV talk show appearances to reach a wider, and also older, audience. This dualism (traditionalism and innovation) is also present in Podemos’ own configuration as a blend of a social movement and a vertically ruled political party, with a simultaneous presence outside and inside representative structures like parliaments and local governments. Far from hiding from recurrent accusations of populism, Podemos takes pride in being considered a populist movement. Actually, their leaders see their party-cum-movement as a practical implementation of the theories of the Argentinean philosopher Ernesto Laclau: their left-leaning populist formation is the necessary vanguard of a new democratic majority that will replace the current neoliberal hegemony. This unusual reflexivity is studied through a critical discourse analysis of published interviews with Podemos’ leaders.

This paper explores Twitter adoption and social media engagement of private German environmental foundations. The study follows Lovejoy and Saxton’s (2012) approach to the hierarchy of social media engagement. It demonstrates the domination of an information provision role on Twitter and the almost equal relevance of action mobilizations and community building posts. At the same time, the study supplements the existing typology with the additional dimension of communication partners addressed in each type of tweet. Finally, using data from interviews, the study interprets and explains the role of social media tweets and patterns of engagement with different groups. In-depth analysis of tweets and interviews with the foundation representatives confirmed a limited use of social media as a means for dialogue and community development. Simultaneously, analysis shows that tweets posted by foundations predominantly address a professional community of other civil society actors, experts and politicians, creating an online expert bubble. Interviews confirmed that such online connections mirror offline cooperation networks that are perceived to be more important for successful communication and project development by the investigated organizations.

Crowdfunding and diaspora philanthropy are two emerging areas of research that are generating excitement in the field of philanthropic studies. However, little if any research examines the shared characteristics and advantages of these two phenomena, and if and how crowdfunding might serve to strengthen efforts in the practice of diaspora philanthropy. This article reviews relevant literature on crowdfunding and diaspora philanthropy, and then analyzes overlapping characteristics, strengths, and limitations of these practices. The article then considers the potential of crowdfunding to contribute toward diaspora philanthropy, giving particular attention to the contexts and challenges faced in philanthropy in the global South.

The technological revolution that began with the Arpanet in the late Sixties has changed the world we live in. The Internet and social media have improved our lives considerably, but the changes came in with a high-price tag attached: our freedom. We now live in a world in which technology has exponentially expanded the power of the State to keep tabs on its citizens (within and across borders). If we continue on this path, democracy as we know it is doomed. Yet the future is not as grey as it might look at first sight. The ubiquity of social media and smartphones and the increasing relevance of the Internet in everyday life have also drastically changed the impact-power of citizens in technologically advanced societies. Understanding these changes is to understand which shape democracy will take in the future.

The diffusion of social media has profoundly transformed the nature and form of the contemporary public sphere, facilitating the rise of new political tactics and movements. In this article, I develop a theory of the social media public sphere as a “plebeian public sphere” whose functioning is markedly different from the traditional public sphere, described by Jürgen Habermas. Differently from Habermas’ critical-rational publics, this social media public sphere is dominated by online crowds that come together in virtual gatherings made visible by a variety of social media reactions and metrics that measure their presence. It can be best described as a “reactive democracy,” a plebiscitary form of democracy in which reactions are understood as an implicit vote indicating the mood of public opinion on a variety of issues.

The emergence of the gig economy has generated a new class of workers who are categorised as independent “partners” instead of employees with rights to labour protection. Triggered by observations of a protest movement by platform-based delivery riders in Thailand, we engaged in seven months of digital ethnographic research of riders’ interactions online to understand the emergence of informal groups facilitating mutual aid and collective action. Civil society research has neglected to analyse such groups within the gig economy. The study finds that social media is a site for the development and contestation of identity narratives. We observed a “Hero” narrative that glorifies delivery riders' independent status and a “Worker” narrative that challenges riders' conditions. We argue that these collective identity narratives crucially facilitate or inhibit the emergence of labour-oriented civil society organisations, thus contributing to third sector research that examines civil society in the Global South.

There is potential for nonprofit organizations to increase effectiveness by mobilizing social media to help achieve goals. However, the sector is only just becoming aware of the possibilities for social media and lags behind other sectors in its use. We report a New Zealand initiative to enhance the capability of nonprofit organizations through action research that has implications for nonprofit organizations elsewhere. Borrowing from resource mobilization theory, we introduce the concept of resource mobilization chains to explain the requirements for and obstacles to taking advantage of social media. A survey and two in-depth case studies found that nonprofit organizations demonstrated extremely limited familiarity with and use of social media. Participants were enthusiastic about the potential of mobilizing social media to achieve organizational goals, but struggled to take concrete steps to implement their aspirations. Lack of resources was a key obstacle identified in both survey and case study research.

The internet plays an important part in our daily lives. In this paper, we ask whether internet use is negatively related to civic life when focusing specifically on formal volunteering. Furthermore, we account for group-specific and activity-specific internet effects. Using a representative population sample of Switzerland, we show that internet use decreases the probability of undertaking voluntary work. This result is qualified in two respects: First, we find that the negative relationship between internet use and volunteering is more powerful among young people than older adults who are more likely to volunteer when they use the internet. Second, the use of social networking sites seems to mitigate the negative influence of internet use on volunteering.

Social media have changed the way politicians communicate with and relate to their constituencies during election campaigns and routine periods alike. Many scholars have postulated that populists would benefit most from the new digital media. Despite their growing importance, few studies have addressed the features of online populist communication and how to assess its success. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by providing a framework for the analysis of populist communication on social media. Taking the case of Italy’s Lega Nord (Northern League (LN)) as an example, the article will clarify which aspects of online communication are most valued by LN supporters, in relation to both the key elements of populism (references to ‘the people’, ‘elites’ and ‘others’) and the expression of an emotional style in the messages. The article analyses the controlled communication that LN and its leader, Matteo Salvini, published on their Facebook profiles during a sample period of 30 days. Our findings demonstrate that populism, emotional style and, in general, the role of the leader as a source of communication positively affect the ‘likeability’ of a message.

We examine Twitter data to assess the impact of media exposes on the reputations of two international nonprofits, Oxfam and Save the Children (STC). Using a random sample of 6794 Tweets, we study the daily gap between positive and negative sentiments expressed towards these organizations. The “unweighted gap” and the “weighted gap” (weighted by the number of followers) of the Twitter handle follow broadly the same trajectory with high fluctuation in response to new negative or positive media stories. Twitter handles with large audiences amplify variability in weighted gap. While Oxfam’s reputation did not fully recover to pre-Haiti levels even 6 months after the scandal, STC’s reputation returned to pre-scandal levels in 8 days, although it fluctuated in response to new revelations. Overall, reputation recovery for both organizations was aided when they received celebrity endorsements and focused public attention on their positive activities, especially by linking to visible global events.

Nonprofit scholars have long considered stakeholder targeting communication (STC), an important mechanism of organizational accountability to meet stakeholders’ diverse interests and needs. However, research has yet to systematically examine the antecedents and outcomes of organizations’ STC to advance a more comprehensive understanding of how organizations manage accountability demands in the digital era. To address this gap, this study proposes a conceptual framework to explain how organizations’ STC on social media (SM) is shaped by STC via non-SM channels and their external communication capacity and the resulting STC outcomes in the SM domain. Survey data from 156 humanitarian relief and development organizations on four continents showed that using non-SM channels to engage various groups of stakeholders helped build organizations’ external communication capacity, which in turn helped improve their engagement in STC on SM. STC on SM further contributed to organizations’ success in information dissemination, community building, and action mobilization outcomes on SM.