Viviana Chiu Sik Wu- Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst
Viviana Chiu Sik Wu
- Ph.D.
- Assistant Professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst
About
15
Publications
3,421
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61
Citations
Introduction
I am an Assistant Professor at the UMass Amherst School of Public Policy. As a nonprofit scholar, I employ a diverse methodological toolkit—including quantitative, qualitative, and computational methods—to investigate how nonprofits, foundations, and communities drive social and policy change through philanthropy, community leadership, and social media advocacy.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2016 - September 2020
Position
- Managing Editor of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ)
September 2015 - August 2016
July 2010 - March 2015
Education
August 2016 - July 2020
August 2014 - August 2015
September 2012 - June 2014
Publications
Publications (15)
Community foundations exemplify a growing form of place-based philanthropic efforts for addressing public problems. However, why do such efforts occur in some places, but not in others? Using an original population dataset of community foundations that combines community characteristics with service area data across 3130 US counties, the empirical...
Community foundations are increasingly looked to as community leaders that coalesce money, people, knowledge, and networks for addressing public problems at the local level. However, the field remains difficult to grasp—what it is and how it materializes in practice. Drawing from both academic and practitioner literature, this article proposes a mu...
This study conceptualises four mechanisms—Mobilisation, Advocacy, Dialogue, and Education ('MADE')—through which foundation actors engage the public on Twitter. We analysed stakeholders targeted and message contents of more than 16,000 tweets collected from 299 Twitter accounts of U.S. community foundations during two 12-month periods. We found evi...
How might donor influence shape the ways community foundations engage with public constituents? Using donor-advised funds to proxy for donor influence, I combined content analysis and structural topic modeling to analyze the themes of 4,055 public engagement messages sent by community foundations on Twitter. The structural topic model results revea...
Mutual aid groups surfaced globally to serve marginalized communities, offering a crucial community‐led crisis response at the onset of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Despite playing a critical role in community‐led crisis responses, the existing literature offers limited insight into why and how they emerged to address the immediate needs of these communi...
The growth of donor-advised funds provides an increasingly robust source of philanthropic capital for community foundations, but its impact on their leadership roles remains unknown. To what extent do community foundations maintain community leadership amid increasing pressure to accommodate donor wishes? Drawing on the institutional logics perspec...
While social media platforms are valuable for examining the online engagement of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations, the research considerations underlying social media data remain opaque to most. Through a systematic review of nonprofit studies that analyze social media data, I propose a methodological framework incorporating three common d...
How do nonprofits advocate and shape climate conversations on Twitter? We answer this question by combining computational analyses with thick descriptions of discursive data to analyze message diffusion on Twitter. We first map a temporal message similarity network comprising 298,073 unique tweets sent by climate action and obstruction nonprofits....
Community philanthropic organizations are increasingly looked to as community leaders that coalesce money, people, knowledge, and networks for addressing public problems. However, little is known about the challenges they face and promises they hold, which might bear important implications for both the philanthropic and nonprofit worlds. This disse...
Research has found that innovative and adaptive nonprofits achieve greater social impact. While we know very little about innovation happening within nonprofits, this article features the case of a 145-year-old, multi-service, nonprofit agency in Philadelphia—Episcopal Community Services (ECS), and discover how innovation can take place in a tradit...
The roles of local nonprofits in addressing ethnic conflicts have been understudied if not overlooked. This paper systematically investigates the bottom-up actions carried out by nonprofits for fostering co-existence. Through examining the data gathered from two online databases, I traced the history of conflicts and juxtaposed it with the time of...
