Strategy

media platforms. During the interviews it was discovered that two other codes emerged impacting social media adoption, community engagement and transparency.

4.1.1 Strategy

The ultimate goal of an organization, whether it be a nonprofit or a social enterprise is the fulfillment of a social mission. Both PPSA and PPSE strive to improve the lives of local

Cambodians through arts education, social support, and professional development. When I conducted the interviews with the staff at PPSA in Battambang, they described their social mission as follows:

It is changing lives through the arts. It doesn’t only mean helping for children, or just promoting arts in Cambodia. It’s changing, everyone’s life. If you practice arts your life will change in a good way. Especially for women and young people are the future of Cambodia. (P4 February 13, 2018)

The central mission was promoting the rebirth of Cambodian art. Though this has been around since 1986 and Cambodian art has been very much reborn, but maybe not everywhere around the country . . . From management all the way down is run by local Cambodians and they are making art because they love it and feel it is an important part of their culture. (P5 February 10, 2018).

On the other hand, PPSE’s social mission is slightly different, because as a social enterprise, their aim is to make a profit, which in turn allows them to provide social benefits to the local community. PPSE’s social mission is thus to “support the artists that graduated from Phare Ponleu Selpak. And those people, after they graduate they come to Siem Reap to perform to be a professional artist. (P3 February 9, 2018).”

In terms of fulfilling the social mission, interviewees from both PPSA and PPSE said that social media went hand-in-hand with the social mission because most of the postings are made with the intention to celebrate the achievements and history of Cambodian art. Interviewee P6 explained how social media is incredibly important for a small country like Cambodia, because

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through social media channels the public, whether it be locally or internationally can learn more about what is going on Cambodia. More specifically, “people can also understand and know about the arts, especially for the circus at PPSA, social media can promote it and let people abroad know what we [PPSA] are doing here (P6 February 13, 2018).” P6 mentioned that this is very important because when people know about the incredible circus show and arts coming from PPSA and PPSE they can then share this information on their own social media which spreads the information even further. Finally P6 further explained that with more knowledge of PPSA due to social media, they can hopefully find more donors and other artists to come visit to work on collaboration projects.

The second component of strategy that Nah and Saxton (2013) proposed was that lobbying and advocacy plays a central role in the decision to adopt social media. This could be achieved by writing posts that influence public policies, affect democratic governance, or empower constituents. They further argued that advocacy could actually be a critical component of an organization’s responsibility to civil society. However this was not a vital component affecting the decision to adopt social media for both PPSA and PPSE. In fact, when asking if PPSE uses social media for lobbying efforts, they informed me that due to the political atmosphere in Cambodia they have to take caution about advocating for anything.

Because of the political atmosphere in Cambodia, we don’t advocate anything . . . Advocating social issues can get you into trouble. Instead, we advocate supporting small local entrepreneurs, supporting local artisans, and we do support environmental programs like the refill not landfill and tree planting, and cleaning up temples as those are not political hot buttons (P1 February 5, 2018).

As seen in the statements by P1, the organization has to be conscious of not posting any material that could be interpreted as challenging the state.

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P2 did mention that PPSE does support some social causes and occasionally they may mention their support in subtle ways.

In terms of advocacy for phare . . . most specifically social media can support things such as HIV/Aids, human rights, workers rights, safe migration, and gender equality (P2 February 5, 2018).

Though occasionally, it is possible that they might construct a post advocating these social issues, P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5 all indicated that it is rare that they do this, and that advocacy and lobbying did not have an affect on why they adopted and continue to use social media. When I did my observations of the social media postings, I noticed that PPSA and PPSE have the same strategy for approaching social issues and sensitive topics. The posts that could be labeled as ‘advocacy posts’ were really subtle. For example, they made a ‘Happy International Woman’s Day’ post to acknowledge their stance on gender equality. They also shared blogs about personal stories from the Phare community that sometimes mentioned themes revolving around human rights issues to articulate the trials and tribulations some community members have faced during their pursuits to become artists; however the postings and blogs never criticized the government or made bold statements to advocate an issue.

The issue that both PPSA and PPSE advocated the most was practicing sustainable or responsible tourism. Many times they shared links written by the news media or bloggers about how to be a responsible tourist when visiting Cambodia. PPSE also made posts about how their circus does not use animals, because when many people hear circus they automatically assume there are animals involved. Furthermore, on Instagram, they tagged many of their photos using the hashtags #responsibletravel and #sustainabletravel.

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