Conclusion

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Chapter 5

Conclusion and Discussion

5.1 Conclusion

This study offers evidence that there are additional factors that influence the choice to adopt and use social media rather than the four factors Nah and Saxton (2013) proposed. These additional reasons are community engagement and transparency. Organizations could adopt social media to provide a place where local community members can actively discuss the activities of the NGO or social enterprise. Traditional websites, are not sufficient enough for the community to participate in dialogue, however social media provides a medium for the

community to ask questions, comment on posts and news, and to voice and share their thoughts and opinions about what the organization is doing. Also, particularly in developing countries, it is crucial for organizations to support one another, because ultimately NGOs and social

enterprises aim to improve society. Thus social media has the capacity to provide a platform where NGOs and social enterprises can share and celebrate the activities of partner or other local organizations. Furthermore, through social media, organizations can collaborate and be part of community campaigns. PPSE accomplished this by partnering with other organizations to make Siem Reap more environmentally clean and sustainable by sharing a hashtag #refillnotlandfill and by promoting reusable water bottles. Also PPSE shared numerous content from

organizations such as Epic Arts and Cambodian Living Arts in order to make the Cambodian art community more prosperous.

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Transparency emerged as a new sub code, showing that social media was adopted as in informational source where the public could see the daily activities of the organization, observe how funding and money were being allocated, and perceive the organization’s future plans and goals. In a country where the media is owned by the state, transparent information on social media is crucial; therefore it is important to incorporate transparency as another motivator affecting social media adoption and use.

In terms of adopting social media strategy, PPSA and PPSE’s purposes were quite different from the reasons proposed by Nah and Saxton (2013). In terms of strategy, the social mission was the only facet relevant towards choosing to adopt social media, while fundraising and lobbying were not essential. Instead of adopting social media to attract donors or to motivate the audience to advocate an issue, social media was instead used as a device to allow each organization more transparency. Fundraising was not an essential motivator in the decision to adopt social media, because social media does not really produce high returns. Though social media can increase donations, it was not really essential; instead email campaigns or directly reaching out to donors was much more beneficial. In terms of lobbying and advocacy, Cambodian NGOs have to be cautious about this, as the country is not quite democratic and organizations have to be wary about what they say. The only thing PPSA and PPSE advocate is access to arts education, but they do not use social media to discuss the political side of this issue.

The second reason NGOs adopt social media is for capacity which entails the internal resources, organizational sixe, website age, and website reach. According to the interviewees all of these were positively correlated to the reasons to adopt and social media, however they were not essential or very important. Essentially, both PPSA and PPSE were able to allocate funding

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to hire social media managers, but the reason they did this was more because it was a trend to invest in social media, rather than just doing it because the budget allowed. The website age had no impact on the decision to adopt social media, as the website was redesigned after social media was already in use. Website reach was seen as a positive benefit to adopting and using social media, but it was not exactly their main goal. Instead, as mentioned before, social media was initially adopted to be an effective communicative device to relay messages to the public.

The third reason for social media adoption was governance, which is about board members and stakeholder influence. For PPSE this had no relevance in the decision to adopt social media. The marketing department decided on their own that social media should be

incorporated as part of the communications strategy, and no outside influencers were involved in this decision. On the other hand, for PPSA board members and stakeholders had some influence to use social media for communicating initiatives from the EU and UNESCO, however, this is not relevant for the continuation of use today.

Environment was the final factor influencing social media adoption and this was about donors and government dependence. For PPSA and PPSE the government gave very little financial support to the organizations, so social media was not intended towards influencing the government whatsoever. For donors, both PPSA and PPSE believed that social media may attract some attention, but it was not the key mission or objective. I decided to investigate whether competition could be another facet of environment, however I found that it is more important to support other organizations rather than compete with them, thus competition was negatively correlated with the choice to adopt social media.

Lovejoy and Saxton (2012) found that about 59% of posts are informational, 26% are for community engagement, and the remaining 15% are for action. For this study, I found that

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community engagement is about the same for PPSA, but higher for PPSE. However, I predict that in the future community engagement posts will actually increase. This claim comes from the observation of how their social media has changed since the period chosen for the data collection as well as the perceptions given during the interviews. Both the managers at PPSA and PPSE said they intended to increase their cross- organizational tagging, they plan to share more user generated content, and they plan to promote other organizations and community events. They believe by doing this, other organizations will return the favor. Furthermore, by featuring user’s photos and video content their visibility and reach will become higher, especially on visual social media platforms such as Instagram.

One of the most significant reasons for the change in strategy between 2016 to now in 2018 is because of the additions of the ‘Explore Feed’ and algorithm changes on Facebook. The explore feed caused business content to have its own feed which significantly limited the reach.

PPSE and PPSA had a choice, do they invest more money in sponsored content, or do they rely on community efforts to increase their reach? Ultimately, they decided on the latter due to the cost effectiveness as well as the fact that supporting community members is merely a positive thing to do and in turn promotes good will. In response to this dilemma, PPSA and PPSE have realized that cross-tagging organizations and sharing user-generated content generates more traffic to their social media while simultaneously it promotes good will within their network.

Unanimously, all of the interviewees agreed that it is important to participate in cross-tagging of other organizations and to share content produced by community members who have visited PPSA and PPSE.

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