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Beyond policy patrons: A ‘MADE’ framework for examining public engagement efforts of philanthropic foundations on Twitter

September 2021
Public Management Review 25(2):1-25

DOI:10.1080/14719037.2021.1982328

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

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 evidence that foundations tend to serve as 'a knowledge hub' to educate the public. Notably, the 2020 sample suggests lessened dialogic messages yet increased mobilisation and advocacy messages amid the COVID-19 pandemic and political movements. This study reveals foundations’ intermediary and shifting roles in engaging the public in times of normalcy and crisis.

Two-step coding procedures on Tweet Messages.

…

Ten most common terms for manual classification.

…

Stakeholder analysis results across 2017, 2020 and the full samples.

…

Content analysis results of public engagement messages across 2017, 2020 and the full samples.

…

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Beyond policy patrons: A ‘MADE’ framework

for examining public engagement efforts of

philanthropic foundations on Twitter

Viviana Chiu Sik Wu

To cite this article: Viviana Chiu Sik Wu (2021): Beyond policy patrons: A ‘MADE’ framework for

examining public engagement efforts of philanthropic foundations on Twitter, Public Management

Review, DOI: 10.1080/14719037.2021.1982328

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2021.1982328

Published online: 21 Sep 2021.

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Beyond policy patrons: A ‘MADE’ framework for

examining public engagement eorts of philanthropic

foundations on Twitter

Viviana Chiu Sik Wu

School of Public Policy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

Abstract

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 evidence that foundations tend to serve as 'a knowledge

hub' to educate the public. Notably, the 2020 sample suggests lessened dialogic

messages yet increased mobilisation and advocacy messages amid the COVID-19

pandemic and political movements. This study reveals foundations’ intermediary

and shifting roles in engaging the public in times of normalcy and crisis.

KEYWORDS Public engagement; foundations; Twitter; advocacy; COVID19

Introduction

Foundation actors are arguably among the most resourceful civil society institutions

for shaping and inﬂuencing public policy and policy communities around the world

(Anheier and Leat 2018; Ferris 2009; Harrow, Jung, and Phillips 2016). For decades,

researchers have characterized foundations as hidden patrons who provide resources

to citizen groups (Walker 1983; Nownes 1995; Lowry 1999). While a growing body of

research has contributed to our understanding of foundations as policy intermediaries

(Reckhow 2016; Tompkins-Stange 2016; Ferris 2009; Bushouse and Mosley 2018;

Williamson and Luke 2020), the intermediary roles of philanthropic foundations in

fostering bottom–up engagement with the public remain unexplored.

Recent years have witnessed escalating policy and scholarly debates whether and

how philanthropic foundations represent public interests and community needs rather

than simply advancing private values and commitment (Reich 2019; Frumkin 2006a;

McGinnis Johnson 2016). To that end, scholars have consistently argued that public

engagement plays a crucial part in maintaining the public beneﬁts and legitimacy of

charitable gifts, potentially reshaping the power dynamics among donors, foundations,

grantees, and the wider community (Ostrander 2007; Eikenberry and Breeze 2019).

CONTACT Viviana Chiu Sik Wu vivianachius@umass.edu

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the

article.

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW

https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2021.1982328

However, prior research on their policy roles has yet to pay much attention to

foundations’ interactions with the public in the online space. This article represents

a focused eﬀort to address this gap.

As the modes and means of public engagement have become diversiﬁed, public and

non-proﬁt organizations increasingly use social media to partake in public discourse and

policy advocacy (Agostino and Arnaboldi 2016; Gordon and Mihailidis 2016; Mergel

2013). While online engagement does not substitute traditional oﬄine engagement, the

networking and dialogic aﬀordances of social media enable policy intermediaries and

entrepreneurs to tap into vast and diverse networks of public stakeholders instanta-

neously at a much lower cost (Guo and Saxton 2018). Such networks embody ‘diﬀused

stakeholders’ and ‘issue publics’, who might not be otherwise visible, salient, or identiﬁ-

able in traditional oﬄine settings (Rainie and Wellman 2012; Guo and Saxton 2020).

Given that philanthropic foundations have been emerging as critical policy actors in

many countries, examining their roles to engage public constituents through the social

media space can provide valuable insights into how philanthropic actors advance

public interests and policy change from the bottom up. We thus ask: How do founda-

tions attempt to engage public stakeholders on social media? To answer this question,

we began by reviewing the extant literature and drawing on inductive analysis to

conceptualize four mechanisms through which foundation actors can engage public

stakeholders on social media, ranging from (1) Public Mobilization, (2) Policy

Advocacy, (3) Public Dialogue, to (4) Public Education (‘MADE’). To further develop

the MADE framework, we employed a two-stage analytic approach combining quan-

titative and qualitative content analyses to examine two-year Twitter data from 299

active Twitter accounts of U.S.-based community foundations spanning

1 September 2016 to 31 August 2017 and 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020. The

ﬁrst stage involved classifying the messages based on the ‘who’ – three stakeholder

groups of foundations, including donors, non-proﬁts, and the wider community.

The second stage involved an inductive analysis of tweet messages to theorize key

public engagement mechanisms based on a random sample of 500 community-

oriented messages in the two sample years.

The study oﬀers important theoretical and empirical contributions to the literature.

In light of the debates on the accountability and publicness concerns of foundations, it

sheds light on the undertheorized roles of philanthropic foundations in engaging

public stakeholders, extending a growing body of research that suggests foundation

actors are more than policy patrons, and emerging as catalysts for change in commu-

nities (Reckhow 2016; Wu 2021a). Second, it evidences and contrasts the shifting roles

of community foundations to mobilize, advocate, discuss, and educate the public on

Twitter in times of normalcy and crisis before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Third, this study makes an empirical contribution by presenting a multi-stage process

in analysing ‘thick’ social media messages in terms of stakeholders and purposes. As

the debates surrounding foundations’ policy roles and public accountability continue

to unfold, this study urges future research in this direction and serves as a reminder to

pay attention to the online space of foundations as policy intermediaries to engage the

public.

2V. C. S. WU

Literature review

The policy roles of foundations and accountability conundrum

While foundations are traditionally characterized as hidden patrons who provide

resources to citizen groups (Walker 1983; Nownes 1995; Lowry 1999), a growing

body of research has identiﬁed that foundations partake in the policy process as

policy intermediaries in many countries (Reckhow 2016; Tompkins-Stange 2016;

Bushouse and Mosley 2018). They act as ‘boundary-spanning groups to provide

a translating function between principals with diﬀerent values and perspectives’.

(Gandara, Rippner, and Ness 2017, 702). However, foundations’ policy inﬂuence

faces no shortage of scrutiny. At the centre of the debate are the accountability and

publicness concerns whether foundations represent public interests and community

needs (Frumkin 2006b; Reckhow 2013; Reich 2019). Foundations are often criti-

cized for being unaccountable, donor-directed, non-transparent, particularistic,

paternalistic, and deﬁcient in democratic values of justice and equality

(Hammack and Anheier 2013; Mosley and Galaskiewicz 2015; Anheier and Leat

2018). On this, scholars have attempted to oﬀer at least two political and economic

rationales for these challenges. Since philanthropy tends to be supply- or donor-led,

wealth and power asymmetry between donor and recipients makes philanthropic

accountability diﬃcult if not altogether absent (Ostrander and Schervish 1990;

Ostrander 2007). On top of power asymmetry, scholars have argued that the very

constitution of self-suﬃciency relieves them from the chronic signals and incen-

tives to be publicly accountable, and as a result, they suﬀer from the ‘benign

fallibility syndrome’. Thus, elitist preferences may be reﬂected, for example, in

the way foundation grants support values and issues favoured by the wealthy and

are insulated from the pressures of democratic accountability (Reich 2019;

Ostrander 2007; Salamon 1987).

Rising call for public engagement in the philanthropic eld

While philanthropic gifts are often claimed to confer public beneﬁts, foundations

tend to be run by the few for the many. The crux of translating monetary gifts to

public interests involves foundations responding to community needs and gaining

public trust and legitimacy in the authorizing environment (Ostrander 2007;

Moore 2000; Leonard 1989). To this end, recent academic and practitioner-

oriented literature has increasingly turned to the concept of public engagement

in hopes of democratizing control and access to philanthropic resources, placing

greater power and voice with public stakeholders who are outside the foundations

(Gibson 2017; Ostrander 2007; Carman and Hefner 2012). Following Nabatchi and

Amsler (2014), this study deﬁnes public engagement as ‘a variety of in-person and

online methods for bringing people together to address issues of public impor-

tance’ (p. 65s). Public engagement is a key step for policy entrepreneurs and

intermediaries to rally for community-led policy change. As Majone (1990, 160)

suggests, ‘ . . . the most basic prerequisite of public deliberation is that the members

of the community agree to focus the debate on some issue of general interest.

Before the dialectic of conﬂicting positions can unfold, there must be widespread

agreement about the nature of the central problems then facing the community’.

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 3

Empirical research that explores foundation roles in public engagement is largely

absent, in part due to the nascent development and the lack of access to foundations’

interpersonal communication. Across the global philanthropic landscape, scholars

increasingly look to community foundations, a type of place-based public foundations,

which have begun to incorporate public engagement in foundation work and gran-

tmaking decisions (Bernholz, Fulton, and Kasper 2005; Gibson 2017; Williamson and

Luke 2020; Guo and Lai 2019; Jung, Harrow, and Phillips 2013). The growing

momentum towards engaging public beneﬁciaries is manifested though their roles to

mobilize and advocate for social change as well as to convene policy conversations and

involve the public in grantmaking decisions and strategies about how to better their

communities (Harrow, Jung, and Phillips 2016; Wu 2021a). In 2021, the Foundation

Center reported that 2,236 community foundations distributed $64.4 billion in grants

around the world, with the majority of 1,058 foundations found in the USA and the

rest in Europe, Asia, Oceania, South Africa, and South America (Candid 2021). While

institutional environment and regulation of foundations diﬀer across countries, com-

munity foundations are a breed apart from private foundations, generally enjoying

more favourable tax treatment than private foundations.

Unlike private foundations,

community foundations are ﬁscally supported by public donations and in theory face

public accountability to the communities they serve, not just to the donors (Wu 2021a;

Jung, Harrow, and Phillips 2013; Ostrander 2007). Because of their peculiar public

character, they have to some extent dodged the taint of self-aggrandizement that has

shadowed foundation philanthropy (Hall 1989). However, with the rise of donor-

advised funds that allow donors to inﬂuence grantmaking priorities, there are mount-

ing concerns about their ability to stand for public interests (Wu 2021a; Ostrander

2007; Easterling and Millesen 2015). Fostering knowledge of foundations’ public

engagement with communities becomes even more critical for understanding, and

when necessary, reshaping the power relations among donors and public beneﬁciaries

to ensure the public aspect of philanthropy (Nickel and Eikenberry 2009; Ostrander

2007).

Mechanisms of public engagement on social media

Social networking through social media has become a common routine for citizens and

organizations in a network society (Castells and Cardoso 2005; Castells 2010). To date,

social media have become more deeply ingrained in millennials’ daily lives than in

older generations in the digital era (Lee 2020; Paulin et al. 2014). While social media do

not displace the forms of engagement that take place in oﬄine and other settings, the

public space aﬀorded by social media presents an open avenue, as well as new empirical

data to explore various means and mechanisms of public engagement unique to the

social media environment. Intrigued by these interactive platforms, researchers have

started to study social media use among public and non-proﬁt organizations.

Notwithstanding their important contribution, much of this research focuses on the

adoption of social media (e.g. Mergel and Bretschneider 2013; Campbell and

Lambright 2019), and evaluating engagement outputs through metrics such as

retweets, shares, and favourites (e.g. Xu and Saxton 2019; Agostino and Arnaboldi

2016). By comparison, fewer studies have qualitatively examined the concrete mean-

ings conveyed in social media messages, and little attention has been given to how

foundation actors are using social media for public engagement in hopes of advancing

4V. C. S. WU

change. One of the exceptions is Lovejoy and Saxton (2012), who proposed the

Information-Community-Action (ICA) framework that identiﬁed three key commu-

nicative functions in the non-proﬁts’ tweets: Share information, build a community,

and mobilize action. While the ICA framework distinguishes various message func-

tions from a communication lens, the theoretical construct is distinct from and hence

not directly transferrable to inform and characterize messages related to public

engagement that ‘brings people together to address issues of public importance’

(Nabatchi and Amsler 2014).

Given that the intermediary roles of philanthropic foundations in fostering bottom-

up public engagement remain underexplored, a central theoretical task of this paper is

to draw on inductive analysis to conceptualize how foundation actors engage the

public on social media. To start with, we review two distinct bodies of research that

examine the policy roles of foundations and how social media can be used for public

engagement. In bridging the two, we propose the MADE framework (Figure 1) as

a base from which to understand how foundations might involve the public in

addressing important public issues through Public Mobilization (M), Policy

Advocacy (A), Public Dialogue (D), and Public Education (E).

(1) Public Mobilization (M)

Extant research suggests that foundations are positioned to coordinate action and

activity to advance particular policy goals (Bushouse and Mosley 2018). On that, the

connective power of social media for building ties, however weak, is well-suited for

Figure 1. The MADE framework.

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 5

foundation actors to broker diverse stakeholders and bring about collective and

connective action for policy change (Paulin et al. 2014; Pond and Lewis 2017; Vicari

and Cappai 2016). In particular, social media enable personalized engagement that

leads actions and content to be distributed widely across loosely organized social

networks (Lance and Segerberg 2012; Turunen and Weinryb 2019). The social net-

working features enable policy intermediaries and entrepreneurs to tap into and

mobilize vast networks of stakeholders at a much lower cost, particularly ‘diﬀused

stakeholders’ and ‘issue publics’ who might not be otherwise visible, salient or identiﬁ-

able in traditional oﬄine settings (Saxton, Ren, and Guo 2020; Tremayne et al. 2006).

(1) Policy Advocacy (A)

Another way foundations can bring people together to address public problems is

through policy advocacy across varied stages of the policy process (Ferris 2009).

Speciﬁcally, Bushouse and Mosley (2018) identiﬁed four intermediary roles of founda-

tions, which include funding networks of advocates to propose or endorse policy ideas,

orchestrating action to elevate policy frames, encouraging others to advocate, and

coalition building with other organizations to exert political inﬂuence on decision

makers. Social media-based advocacy allows foundation actors to engage the citizens

by broadcasting their policy visions and exerting public inﬂuence extensively beyond

geographical boundaries (Guo and Saxton 2014; Gupta, Ripberger, and Wehde 2018).

A growing line of research suggests that social media platforms are popularly used for

policy advocacy, ranging from galvanizing public attention to policy issues, inﬂuencing

policy frames, and advocating policy changes (An, Wu, and Guo 2017; Guo and Saxton

2014).

(1) Public Dialogue (D)

Crowd-sourcing citizen inputs plays an important role in co-production and generat-

ing ideas in the early stage of the policy process (Brandsen and Pestoﬀ 2006; Liu 2021).

As Tompkins-Stange (2016) observed, foundations’ policy inﬂuence goes beyond the

traditional way of shaping legislative outputs. Foundations also engage in various

online and oﬄine policy activities such as convening and changing public conversa-

tions about policy issues (Wu 2021a). Social media may thus serve as a convening tool

for foundations to create dialogue between stakeholders and civil society actors

(Lovejoy and Saxton 2012). The dialogic engagement complements monologic inter-

action, enabling two-way conversation between and across stakeholders in the

Twitterverse.

(1) Public Education (E)

Just as advocacy eﬀorts can be made to create ‘echo chambers’ that direct targeted

messages at legislators and other policymakers, public education eﬀorts on social

media space can draw widespread public attention and quickly convey important

ideas in the minds of citizens (Feezell 2018; Ferris 2009). Knowledge is the acumen

for catalysing public problem-solving. As Phillips et al. (2016) pointed out, ‘the greatest

asset of a community foundation is not the size of its endowment, but its knowledge of

community and ability to use this knowledge for positive change’ (66). By relaying

6V. C. S. WU

policy knowledge released by research reports and news through social media, founda-

tions can instantaneously inform citizens of the severity and urgency of a policy issue.

Their roles to foster public knowledge and policy innovation are particularly salient

during the agenda-setting stage of policymaking and in the time leading up to

legislative votes, elections, or ballot initiatives (Phillips et al. 2016; Bushouse and

Mosley 2018). Aside from the traditional top-down, insider approach, social media

enable a more transparent and non-hierarchical way of knowledge interaction between

foundations as intermediaries and their policy stakeholders such as knowledge com-

munities, legislators, grantees and the public (Noland and Newton 2015; Bernholz,

Skloot, and Varela 2010).

In sum, this review of existing research serves as a conceptual guide to inform our

investigation of foundations’ public engagement eﬀorts on Twitter. Nonetheless, we

lack empirical evidence that exempliﬁes and corroborates the framework in the extant

literature. Through analysing Twitter data inductively, we further bolster the frame-

work to understand how community foundations attempt to bring people together to

address issues of public importance on Twitter.

Data and method

Data mining and collection with Twitter API

Compared to oﬄine settings, social media platforms such as Twitter have an open

Application Programming Interface (API), which enables scholars to gather data on

the platforms’ public communication activities. While Facebook and Twitter are the

two most commonly studied social media platforms (e.g. Lam and Nie 2020; Guo and

Saxton 2014; Campbell and Lambright 2020), access to Facebook data was highly

restricted at the time of conducting this research.

This study examines community

foundations’ use of Twitter for public engagement. Following prior studies, Twitter is

well suited for analysing online engagement and advocacy, and broadly serves as

a proxy for overall social media use (e.g. Guo and Saxton 2018; Lovejoy, Waters, and

Saxton 2012; Svensson, Mahoney, and Hambrick 2015).

The study uses U.S.-based community foundations (CFs) as the study population.

The study subjects were ﬁrst identiﬁed from the list of community foundations on

the Council on Foundations website (www.cof.org) between 2017 and 2018. Through

manual veriﬁcation and screening out irrelevant and dormant organizations, the

complete list contains 956 community foundations in the U.S. At the time of data

collection, a total of 299 CFs had a unique oﬃcial Twitter account, although not all

were active on Twitter. It is worthwhile to note that the sampled foundations with

Twitter presence on average were older and had larger assets, grants and contribu-

tions, incurring more lobbying expenses than those that were not on Twitter

(Table 1).

After identifying their Twitter proﬁles, a customized Python programming lan-

guage was used to collect community foundations’ public tweets. To respect Twitter

user privacy and the intellectual property of Twitter, we conducted data mining in

compliance with the terms set by the Twitter API through an authorized academic

developer account. We conducted two rounds of Twitter data collection in 2017 and

2021 respectively. The ﬁrst dataset includes 50,536 original tweets (i.e. non-retweets)

sent by 266 foundations between 1 September 2016 and 31 August 2017. We then

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 7

repeated the same data collection process in 2021. The second dataset consists of

30,900 original messages sent by 200 community foundations between 1 January 2020

and 31 December 2020.

Two-stage analysis procedures

For the purpose of this study, we employed a two-stage process to identify and examine

public engagement messages through stakeholder analysis (who was targeted) and

inductive analysis (what was communicated) as shown in Figure 2. We created

a random stratiﬁed sample of 20% of the original tweets for stakeholder analysis, followed

by an inductive analysis of 500 randomly sampled public engagement messages. In

particular, we argue that distinguishing the stakeholders targeted and deciphering the

actual texts being communicated is crucial to understanding how foundations attempt to

interact and engage the public on social media (here, on Twitter). While social media

engagement might be construed generally as interaction and communication on social

media, our analysis showed they do not signify or fall within the conceptual tenets of

public engagement per se (Nabatchi and Amsler 2014). Additionally, while using metrics

of likes and retweets can quantify and proxy for the reach of message audiences, social

Table 1. Organizational characteristics of community foundations by Twitter Presence.

Community Foundations on Twitter Community Foundations not on Twitter

Statistics N Mean SD Min Max N Mean SD Min Max

Age (as of 2017) 297 31 19 0 101 643 26 15 1 112

Total Assets

(US$100,000)

297 2209 8027 1 125,639 643 408 1257 0 26,914

Grants (US$100,000) 297 228 1154 0 18,264 643 36 158 0 2974

Contributions (US$100,000) 297 260 986 0 14,625 643 49 195 0 3915

Lobbying Expense (US$) 297 5370 45,825 0 750,000 643 201 2641 0 59,937

A total of 940 community foundations’ IRS 990 records for 2017 were found on the National Center for Charitable

Statistics (NCCS). Since two foundations on Twitter did not have 990 data for 2017, resulting in N = 297.

Table 2. Stakeholder analysis results across 2017, 2020 and the full samples.

2017 Sample 2020 Sample Full Sample

Stakeholders Purposes Count % Count % Count %

Donors Fundraising 1630 16% 1585 26% 3215 20%

Non-Proﬁts Grantmaking 2055 20% 1816 29% 3871 24%

Community Relationship Building 4502 45% 1046 17% 5548 34%

Public Engagement 1609 16% 1659 27% 3268 20%

Nebulous NA 300 3% 74 1% 374 2%

Grand Total 10,096 100% 6180 100% 16,276 100%

Table 3. Content analysis results of public engagement messages across 2017, 2020 and the full samples.

2017 Sample 2020 Sample Full Sample

Count % Count % Count %

Public Mobilization 20 8% 65 26% 85 17%

Policy Advocacy 37 15% 63 25% 100 20%

Public Dialogue 78 31% 34 14% 112 22%

Public Education 115 46% 88 36% 203 41%

Grand Total 250 100% 250 100% 500 100%

8V. C. S. WU

media messages present rich textual data that convey the contexts and meanings

pertinent to inform the types of social media engagement, such as public engagement.

Hence, this study focused on deciphering Twitter messages to explore public engagement

mechanisms on Twitter. The initial analysis revealed that Twitter messages target diverse

stakeholders and serve distinct purposes, warranting a two-step analysis process to

identify and dissect the nuanced meanings embedded in messages.

Stakeholder analysis of Twitter messages

Drawing on the notion of online stakeholder targeting, the ﬁrst step of analysis

involved analysing the tweets based on the three key stakeholders served by commu-

nity foundations: charitable donors, non-proﬁt organizations, and the community at

Step 1: Stakeholder Analysis

Step 2: Inductive Analysis

Random sampling of 250 public

engagement messages by 76 CFs

Random sampling of 250 public

engagement messages by 74 CFs

The full list of 956 community foundations (CFs)

Data collection of 299 CFs’ Twitter

accounts via Twitter API

2017 Dataset

50,536 original messages

sent by 266 CFs

(Sept 1, 2016 - Sept 1, 2017)

2020 Dataset

30,900 original messages

sent by 200 CFs

(Jan 1/2020 –Dec 31, 2020)

20% stratified sampling of

10,096 original messages

20% stratified sampling of

6,180 original messages

1,659 public engagement messages

identified

1,609 public engagement messages

identified

Figure 2. Two-step coding procedures on Tweet Messages.

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 9

Figure 3. Ten most common terms for manual classiﬁcation.

10 V. C. S. WU

large (Graddy and Morgan 2006; Leonard 1989; Saxton and Guo 2014). These stake-

holders correspond to the three primary roles of a community foundation as a funder

who reaches out to donors, a grantmaker who oﬀers grants to non-proﬁts, and

a community leader who catalyzes community change (Magat 1989; Wu 2021a). One

experienced coder analysed the messages based on a stakeholder classiﬁcation scheme

proposed by Saxton and Guo (2014) in which community foundations’ tweets are

targeted at one of the primary stakeholders for several strategic purposes: First, Donor-

oriented, which includes tweets for fundraising and providing service to

donors; second, Non-Proﬁt-oriented, which includes tweets that address funding

opportunities, grant-writing, managerial needs of charitable organizations and gran-

tees’ works; third, Community-oriented, which includes tweets for community events,

volunteering opportunities, and sharing information about community needs. Based

on this coding scheme, we assigned a single code – donor-oriented, non-proﬁt-

oriented, or community-oriented – to each tweet according to the primary stakeholder

targeted and related purposes.

Inductive analysis of public engagement messages

In the second step, we analysed the data inductively to identify theoretical con-

structs and conceptual categories pertinent to public engagement. Due to the large

size of the text data, we randomly sampled 250 community-oriented public engage-

ment messages from the 2017 sample and the 2020 sample respectively for in-depth

analysis (n = 500). Two coders conducted open and axial coding to analyse the

sampled messages (Corbin and Strauss 2015; Sloan and Quan-Haase 2017). After

creating codes that described the ﬁrst 100 tweets, we then compared our codes and

created a preliminary codebook for coding the rest of the tweets while adding new

codes as they emerged. We then constructed linkages between the codes through

axial coding, which resulted in a high-level codebook of four thematic categories

and 10 sub-themes of engagement practices (Corbin and Strauss 2015). Based on

the codebook, we repeated the content analysis procedure to analyse the second

sample. Newly coded messages were compared to those previously coded to ensure

reliability and consistency across the two samples (Williamson, Given, and Sciﬂeet

2017). Diﬀerences in codings, when discovered, were resolved through discussion

until consensus was achieved. At this point in the analysis, we considered coding

additional data but concluded to have reached saturation (Corbin and Strauss

2015).

Results

Stakeholder analysis results

While being informed by Saxton and Guo’s classiﬁcation described above, the early

rounds of coding revealed two new categories engendered from community-oriented

messages, namely, ‘Relationship Building’ and ‘Public Engagement’ themes.

Eventually, we classiﬁed the stratiﬁed sampled tweets into four categories that

described the primary stakeholders and purposes of tweet messages (see Table 2): (1)

donors for fundraising purposes (n = 3,215, 20%), (2) non-proﬁt grantees for gran-

tmaking purposes (n = 3,871, 20%), (3) community stakeholders for purposes of

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 11

relationship building (n = 5,548, 34%), and (4) community stakeholders for public

engagement purposes (n = 3,268, 20%), with two percent nebulous tweets that did not

contain interpretable text, such as a URL link.

Typical examples of relationship building messages are motivational quotes and

seasons’ greetings, appreciation towards the public or speciﬁc stakeholders, sharing

community news and organizational announcements. For instance, Community

Foundation of Washington County in Mississippi wrote that ‘My heart goes out to

all the people aﬀected by Hurricane Harvey . . . ’ Madison Community Foundation in

Wisconsin replied to a new follower ‘Thank you @UserID for the follow! Be sure to

check out our website to learn more about us . . . ’

Messages coded as ‘Public Engagement’ entailed communication directed at invol-

ving the community for improving community well-being or addressing public pro-

blems. These messages ranged from providing policy information on pressing

community needs, disseminating civic education opportunities, convening civic dia-

logue, such as discussion forums, advocating policy ideas and issues, promoting

political and collective action such as voting and protests, as well as volunteering

and civic action (see Appendix 1 for the codebook for message classiﬁcation). Another

deﬁning feature was that messages coded under public engagement identiﬁed or spoke

to speciﬁc policy issues. For instance, Miami Foundation broadcast a community event

to address youth violence, ‘Tonight: ﬁnal #TogetherForChildren community meeting

at South Dade Regional Library to address youth violence’. The Boston Foundation

weighed in on immigrant communities, ‘Immigrants & their families, have made & will

continue 2 make Greater Boston, Ma & the U.S.A thrive! #sharedfuture . . . ’ Figure 3

displays ten most common terms for stakeholder classiﬁcation.

Results from inductive analysis of public engagement messages

A closer examination of the 500 public engagement messages from the 2017 and 2020

samples (Table 3) led to the development of four mechanisms and 10 practices through

which community foundations engage with the public on Twitter. The following

section discusses how the community foundations we studied engage the public on

Twitter, with illustrations and thematic proportions of the four mechanisms(see Tables

4 and 5).

(1) Public Mobilization (M)

Mobilization involves the engagement mechanisms of securing community-based

support, calling public members to act, and rallying resources to exert policy inﬂuence.

The 2017 sampled tweets showed a very limited mobilizing role played by community

foundations; only eight percent of tweets (N = 20) were classiﬁed in this category.

Nonetheless, the mobilization messages mounted to 26% (N = 65), i.e. more than

tripled in the 2020 sampled tweets.

The data revealed multiple ways that the sampled community foundations mobi-

lized public action, including calling for political participation (such as voter registra-

tion, census and voter mobilization), civic participation (such as volunteering for

community service), social movement (such as protests and marching) and driving

behavioural change (such as #PublicTransitDay, supporting black-own businesses).

For instance, the Brooklyn Foundation (@BklynFoundation) encouraged citizens to

12 V. C. S. WU

participate in the census, ‘Have you ﬁlled out your census yet? 10 minutes is all it takes

to #makebrooklyncount and ensure our communities get their fair share of represen-

tation and resources for the next decade . . . ’ Similarly, Northern New Jersey

Community Foundation (@NNJCF) sought to mobilize voters for the 2020 presidential

election, ‘Vote today in the general election. Polls are open in New Jersey from 6 a.m. to

8 p.m . . . . #vote #generalelection’. To pledge support to black-owned and black-

operated businesses, North Valley Community Foundation (@NVCF) tweeted, ‘Let’s

support our community, check out this list of black-owned and black-operated busi-

nesses right here in butte county to support . . . #blacklivesmatter #juneteenth #wear-

eresilient #buttestrong.’ These messages point to foundations’ mobilizing roles to call

for public to act on social causes and policy issues.

(1) Policy Advocacy (A)

The second public engagement mechanism that emerged from the analysis corre-

sponds to policy advocacy, which involves proposing or endorsing ideas, visions and

priorities that foundations see for the community, and coalition building with other

organizations to exert political inﬂuence on decision makers. We found that advocacy

was little used in the 2017 dataset, but more prevalent in the 2020 dataset. It might be in

part due to the fact that 2020 was not only an election year during a global pandemic, it

Table 4. Content analysis of public engagement messages (1 September 2016–31 August 2017).

Category Example Freq (%)

Public Mobilization (M) 20 8%

1. Political

Participation

Cfectnews: November 1 is the deadline to register to vote online or by

mail before Election Day (11/8)! Click for all the . . . https://t.co/

v0FKyyusCy

2. Social Movement Miamifoundation: 4.29: ‘March for jobs, justice and climate’ Miami

People’s Climate March with @ UserID. https://t.co/xxN39sazSi

3. Behavioural

Change

Miamifoundation: ‘Are you on board with #PublicTransitDay? Join

hundreds of Miamians pledging to ride transit on 12.9 . . . ’

4. Civic Action Miamifoundation: @UserID weighs in on driving civic engagement in

#ourmiami – vote, volunteer, share your stories. https://t.co/

MQpqIfpHrN

Policy Advocacy (A) 37 15%

5. Endorse or Propose

Policy Ideas

Tsﬀ: ‘Housing is looked at as a proﬁtable good, not as a basic right’.

@UserID @UserID #aﬀordablehousing

6. Coalition Building Nycommtrust: Victory! Our grants backed increasing NY’s age of criminal

responsibility to 18. NY Assembly passes #RaiseTheAge https://t.co/

7BZcbsfsRh

Public Dialogue (D) 78 31%

7. Crowdsourcing

public ideas

Miamifoundation: How can we ensure all Miamians live within a 10-min.

walk of a park? Host a #MyMiamiStory conversation, spark ideas

https://t.co/tE8oRuXJxK

8. Convene public

deliberation

CommFound: Join us for A Public Aﬀair on @UserID on 7/24 @ 8:35 re:

our county’s educational achievement gap & the role of ELPASO.

#CommunityCatalyst https://t.co/E4x0Qh88KC

Public Education (E) 115 46%

9. Civic education KBCFoundation1: Come to our Citizen Science lecture this Thursday

evening! https://t.co/OMTZoizImF

10. Policy information cfsww: The types of homeless people had changed . . . so too might

have the conditions that put them on the streets. https://t.co/

2R0QuGej7j

Total 250 100%

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 13

was a year, among other things, marked by the rising call for racial justice and equality

in the U.S. The results showed that the advocacy messages went up from 15% (N = 37)

to 25% (N = 63), although it consistently ranked as the second smallest category of the

four engagement mechanisms in both years.

As the results have shown, Twitter served our studied foundations as a public

channel for broadcasting their visions for social and policy change and their attempts

to steer public awareness and government policies. For instance, the San Francisco

Foundation (@TSFF) tweeted, ‘Housing is looked at as a proﬁtable good, not as a basic

right’. The Boston Foundation (@bostonfdn), ‘Immigrants & their families, have made

Table 5. Content analysis of public engagement messages (1 January 2020–31 December 2020).

Category Example Freq (%)

Public Mobilization (M) 65 26%

1. Political

Participation

NNJCF: ‘Vote today in the general election. Polls are open in New Jersey

from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. for information, go to . . . #vote

#generalelection’

2. Social Movement BklynFoundation: ‘This weekend, join the #census2020 march for

#racialjustice! The census isn’t just a numbers game, it is what guides

resource allocation in NYC and across the country. Join @UserID this

Sunday, August 2nd, at 1:30 pm to demand resource justice and to

#makebrooklyncount.’

3. Behavioural

Change

NVCF: ‘Let’s support our community, check out this list of black-owned

and black-operated businesses right here in butte county to support.

We will continue to add to this list . . . #blacklivesmatter #juneteenth

#weareresilient #buttestrong’

4. Civic Action NVCF: ‘looking for ways to celebrate Juneteenth in our community?

Check out this list of events happening near you. Don’t forget to

protect your community and wear your mask. Let’s celebrate as

a community and stand united in the ﬁght for racial justice.

#juneteenth #blacklivesmatter . . . ’

Policy Advocacy (A) 63 25%

5. Endorse or Propose

Policy Ideas

Colsfoundation: ‘The Columbus foundation is proud to stand with

hundreds of businesses in support of the Columbus city council

resolution declaring racism to be a public health emergency. Read

more . . . ’

6. Coalition Building Siliconvalleycf: ‘In a letter to @UserID (Governor of California), nearly 40

philanthropic orgs, driven by our shared commitment to a just &

equitable California, elevated the need to protect & support

immigrants & their families who are integral to our social, economic

& civic fabric’.

Public Dialogue (D) 34 14%

7. Crowdsourcing

public ideas

CommFound: ‘Did you know? Trends diary is a place for boulder county

residents of all ages to share personal experiences that relate to

a pressing community need. Learn more and submit your story.

#communitycatalyst #bldrctytrends #doingourpartco’

8. Convene public

deliberation

cﬀound: ‘Now, more than ever, central Florida needs to talk. not just

about the good and the bad we’re facing today, but about how we’ll

create the future. Join us 10/1 for the conversation our community

needs now. Get ready for table talk by visiting . . . #cﬀtabletalk’

Public Education (E) 88 36%

9. Civic/public

education

Siliconvalleycf: ‘Have you been sent an email w/ misinformation about

#covid19 or the #2020elections? You’re not alone. Learn more about

“Democracy in the Covid-19 Infodemic” on Thursday, May 28 @1pm

with @UserID & SVCF program oﬃcer @UserID Register . . . ’

10. Policy information PittsburghFdn: ‘@UserID presents four recommendations from a public

health expert on how Allegheny county can reduce the toll of the

pandemic and improve equity in vaccine distribution . . . ’

Total 250 100%

14 V. C. S. WU

& will continue 2 make Greater Boston, MA & the U.S.A thrive! #sharedfuture . . . ’ In

one of its tweets, Columbus Foundation (@colsfoundation) wrote it was ‘proud to

stand with hundreds of businesses in support of the Columbus city council resolution

declaring racism to be a public health emergency’. Foundations also advance their

policy agendas by sponsoring and forging coalition with other organizations. In some

instances, their eﬀorts successfully changed the policy agenda, as reported by the

New York Community Trust (@NYCommTrust), ‘Victory! Our grants backed increas-

ing NY’s age of criminal responsibility to 18. NY Assembly passes #RaiseTheAge . . . ’

Similarly, community foundations initiate or join campaigns with other organizations

to put political pressure on governors and lawmakers. Silicon Valley Community

Foundation (@siliconvalleycf) advocated its position with others on Twitter, ‘In

a letter to @gavinnewsom (Governor of California), nearly 40 philanthropic orgs,

driven by our shared commitment to a just & equitable California, elevated the need

to protect & support immigrants & their families who are integral to our social,

economic & civic fabric’.

(1) Public Dialogue (D)

Public Dialogue reﬂects the public engagement mechanism through which a civil

society actor convenes community dialogue on policy issues for multisectoral pro-

blem-solving. The engagement level of dialogue is distinct from the mobilization

level as it involves less participation from the community, with no speciﬁc calls for

action to inﬂuence public decisions, other than making public dialogue on commu-

nity or policy issues (Fung 2015). As seen from the full results listed in Tables 1, 22%

of the engagement tweets (N = 112) were primarily for building dialogues, which

constituted the second largest category of public engagement and was slightly higher

than the proportion of tweets sent for policy advocacy and public mobilization.

Comparing the analysis results across the two years, dialogic messages made up

14% (N = 34) in the 2020 data, which was nearly half of that in the 2017 dataset

(31%, N = 78). The pandemic and social distancing regulations likely explain the

reduced dialogic engagement in the 2020 sampled data, which featured little in-

person gathering and public discussion, but mostly virtual events and online

engagement.

We found that dialogue-related tweets contained two primary mechanisms, in

which community foundations (a) invited citizens to engage in informal conversa-

tions around community issues and (b) convened a formal event for public delib-

eration on speciﬁc policy areas, be it online or oﬄine. Discursive form of

engagement is a unique mechanism for producing collective decisions and an

important ﬁrst step in fostering civic identity and inviting citizen inputs on com-

munity issues (Carpini et al. 2004; Cooper 2005; Grønbjerg & Prakash 2017). The

data showed that this engagement mechanism involved two-way participation,

including inviting ideas from the community, through convening face-to-face for-

ums, online and oﬄine events for creating continuous online dialogues with the

public. For example, the Community Foundation Boulder County (@CommFound)

Trends Diary initiative asks community members to share personal experiences on

pressing community needs: ‘Did you know? Trends Diary is a place for boulder

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 15

county residents of all ages to share personal experiences related to a pressing

community need. Learn more and submit your story. #communitycatalyst #bldrcty-

trends #doingourpartco’.

Community foundations’ savvy use of hashtags should be noted. A Twitter hashtag

is a string of characters preceded by the # character, used to annotate tweets pertaining

to the same topic. For instance, many community foundations created event hashtags

such as ‘#MyMiamiStory’, ‘#WhatMotivatesMeIn4Words’ and ‘#OntheTable2017ʹ to

invite community-wide, cross-sector dialogue and deliberation surrounding problem

deﬁnitions or to co-create possible policy solutions (Gastil 2008). Hashtagging is not

merely a technical tool but can be used to signify a user’s identiﬁcation with a cause and

an issue-based community (Pond and Lewis 2017). Hashtags can also create ‘hashtag

publics’ connecting strangers in conversations who share common concerns and

grievances on public problems such as #vote and #blacklivesmatter (Bruns et al. 2016).

(1) Public Education (E)

One crucial way foundations can translate public interests and respond to commu-

nity needs is by illuminating local policy problems and disseminating policy infor-

mation. The results from the content analysis showed that public education was the

most common engagement function of our studied foundations in the sample years.

Compared to the other mechanisms, educational messages involved one-way inter-

action as the tweets were mostly informational (Lovejoy and Saxton 2012). A large

part of the sampled tweets (N = 203, 41%) was classiﬁed under this category; many

tweets supplied policy-related information. For example, the Community

Foundation for Southwest Washington (@CFSWW) tweeted about homelessness

and sought to raise community awareness of how the housing market might alter

homeless populations. ‘The types of homeless people had changed . . . so too might

have the conditions that put them on the streets . . . ’ Pittsburgh Community

Foundation (@PittsburghFdn) shared health information on vaccine distribution

during the pandemic, ‘ . . . four recommendations from a public health expert on

how Allegheny county can reduce the toll of the pandemic and improve equity in

vaccine distribution . . . ’ Community foundations also sent out opportunities to

build civic leadership and community problem-solving skills by organizing public

education events, citizen science workshops and design thinking classes. For

instance, Silicon Valley Community Foundation (@siliconvalleycf) promoted a vir-

tual educational event on ‘Democracy in the Covid-19 Infodemic’ on misinformation

about #covid19 or the #2020elections.

Discussion and conclusion

This article represents a focused eﬀort to address the paucity of research in under-

standing public foundations’ roles in engaging the public on Twitter. Our inductive

analysis of Twitter messages revealed that community foundations attempt to bring

people together to address issues of public importance through ten engagement

practices under four key mechanisms ranging from Public Mobilization, Policy

Advocacy, Public Dialogue, to Public Education (MADE). The analysis indicated

varying levels of publicness among the sampled foundations over two years

(Moulton and Eckerd 2012; Bozeman 2007). In particular, the foundations remained

16 V. C. S. WU

more active at the early stage of engagement to serve as ‘a knowledge hub’ to inform

and educate the public about policy issues. Interestingly, their public engagement roles

changed over time between the two halves of the sample. Compared to the 2017

sampled tweets, the 2020 sample showed an upsurge in mobilizing and advocacy

roles to call for actions and policy changes, yet a lessened dialogic role of foundations

in fostering public discourse.

The upsurge of community foundations’ roles in public mobilization (M) and

policy advocacy (A) in 2020 warrants particular attention. For one, 2020 was an

unprecedented year for countries around the world and for the U.S. The presidential

election, the global COVID-19 pandemic, and eﬀorts to advance racial justice created

widespread unmet needs in local communities. The results from the 2020 sample

reﬂected responses to these major social and political events, echoing the early evi-

dence that community foundations have demonstrated leadership to establish new

philanthropic funds, solicit community feedback, and advocate for change in public

policy during the pandemic (Paarlberg et al. 2020; Finchum-Mason, Husted, and

David 2020). The rise in mobilizing and advocacy messages signals foundation capacity

to advance social change and to be seen as a ‘community leader’ in times of crisis (Wu

2021a). Nonetheless, relatively fewer messages were devoted to the mechanisms of

advocacy and mobilization in the 2017 data, indicating that mobilizing and advocating

on Twitter tend to be less notable in regular times among the sampled foundations.

While the societal contexts can be a confounding factor that explains the discrepancy,

others have noted that commitment to mobilizing and advocacy work requires institu-

tional investment and organizational learning to take place (Millesen and Martin 2014;

Williamson and Luke 2020). Other concerns observed by Scaife et al. (2012) around

engaging in advocacy were reputational damage, political ramiﬁcations, unwillingness

to go against government policy and potential negative media coverage.

The ﬁnding that community foundations may play a much greater role in building

policy knowledge and disseminating policy-related information (E) is an important

one, suggesting their role as intermediaries to inform the public of community needs

and policy issues. A possible explanation for the large proportion of policy knowledge

messaging is that community foundations serve as a knowledge hub to supply neces-

sary policy knowledge and position themselves as ‘a knowledge leader’ on Twitter

(Phillips et al. 2016; Wu 2021a; Manetti, Bellucci, and Bagnoli 2017). While the public

education role tends to be unidirectional and lack a participatory element, the founda-

tions help translate and frame information so that the public and multi-stakeholders

understand the issues at hand for solving wicked problems (Fung 2015). They also help

prioritize community discourse on important policy issues in the long run, which in

turn helps set a community’s change agenda (Phillips et al. 2016).

Following public education, the content analysis revealed that the second largest

proportion entailed messages aimed at initiating policy dialogue and public delibera-

tion (D). This dialogic mechanism implies the intermediary role of community

foundations as conveners to connect multi-stakeholders on addressing policy issues

(Wu 2021a). Their public engagement eﬀorts in convening public dialogue might

suggest their capacity as ‘a bridging convener’ on Twitter that bridges various policy

networks when there is a lack of direct contact or tie between two or more parties

(Bushouse and Mosley 2018). The two-way exchange of information can often cross-

sectoral boundaries with participants from public, private, and non-proﬁt sectors.

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 17

Foundation actors can spark online, two-way community dialogues and invite com-

munity members to participate in deliberative communication in an oﬄine, more

structured setting (Nabatchi 2012; Lovejoy and Saxton 2012).

Taken together, this study responds to the rising call in the philanthropic ﬁeld for

foundations to represent public interests and community needs rather than simply

advancing private values and commitment (Reich 2019; Frumkin 2006a; McGinnis

Johnson 2016). To that end, public engagement plays a crucial part in placing greater

power and voice with public stakeholders who are outside the foundations (Gibson

2017; Ostrander 2007; Carman and Hefner 2012). The upsurge in mobilizing and

advocacy roles of community foundations during the challenging year of 2020 signals

foundations’ pivot to online public engagement as a mechanism to respond to soaring

community needs. Given that the intermediary roles of foundations in fostering

bottom–up public engagement remain underexplored, this research contributes to

conceptualizing their roles in engaging the public on Twitter and fanning the winds

of change in the scholarly and philanthropic communities.

Limitations and future directions

There are, of course, limitations to this research. While the content analysis of the

Twitter messages has rendered an understanding of how public foundations engage

citizens online, it has not allowed us to explore other data sources, such as interviews

and surveys, to understand the governance and management aspects of social media

use. Second, it does not speak squarely on the outcomes and eﬀectiveness of these

public engagement eﬀorts. There is growing evidence that online engagement is related

to oﬄine activities and the data presented seems to support that foundations promoted

both oﬄine and virtual events on social media (Guo and Saxton 2020). A third

limitation relates to the use of social media data. While social media use of foundations

might vary along demographic, ethnic, socio-economic, and ecological lines, this study

cannot explain the factors that promote public engagement on social media nor delve

into the variations of social media users because of study scope, data restrictions and

privacy reasons (Wu 2021b; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012; Piatak, Dietz, and

Mckeever 2019). The study is limited in analysing Twitter data alone. Hence, the

ﬁndings might inform but not necessarily reﬂect public engagement taking place in

other means and on other social media platforms such as Facebook. Facebook appears

to be used more to publish content in a dialogic perspective that creates two-way,

collaborative conversations with users (Manetti, Bellucci, and Bagnoli 2017).

While the Twitter data uncovered online endeavours of community foundations to

connect with the public, this study paves way to various lines of future research. In

particular, scholars, non-proﬁts and civil society actors continue to wrestle with the

impact question, what makes an eﬀective digital activism and mobilization, beyond

‘clicktivism’ or “slacktivism”(Freelon, Mcilwain, and Clark 2018; Pond and Lewis

2019)? How and under what conditions and institutional contexts would non-proﬁts

’ social media eﬀorts draw public attention and translate into impact that shapes public

agenda and policy making (Guo and Saxton 2020; Feezell 2018)? Since organizations

might use social media platforms diﬀerently, future studies that diﬀerentiate social

media channels for various message purposes and audiences will be insightful. Who

are the key civil society players in the advocacy ecosystem that can pose as ‘transfor-

mative’ central nodes in bringing about policy changes? What are the community and

18 V. C. S. WU

organizational factors explaining the varied engagement practices across civil society

organizations (Neumayr, Schneider, and Meyer 2015; Hong and Nadler 2016)?

Comparative studies on the nexus of public policy and advocacy roles of foundations

as well as the community obligations of such entities are much needed (Ferris 2009;

Williamson and Luke 2020). Community foundations outside the U.S. context might

display other forms of public engagement that are not explored in the article, due to

varied institutional contexts, government-foundation relationships and social media

ecology (Anheier 2018; Rey-Garcia 2019; Chan and Lai 2018). Cross-country exam-

ination will be a fruitful avenue to enhance generalizability, expanding the theoretical

knowledge of foundations’ dispositions and ways of public engagement.

Future work that explores the governance aspect of social media strategy will also be

insightful. Speciﬁcally, who manages social media accounts and sends out social media

messages, be it the board member, staﬀ member or volunteer? Potentially, various

types of social media management can aﬀect the foundations’ tendency to engage with

the public and partake in advocacy and mobilization. Board members who provide

strategic directions of foundations might be inclined to do more advocacy and

mobilization, whiles staﬀ and volunteers who manage day-to-day operations might

focus on promoting events and activities, as well as policy information on social media.

Network scholars can further investigate the extent to which foundations are each

other’s audience and uncover the isomorphic patterns and potential ‘peer pressure’ in

their tweets (Kerlin et al. 2021; Paarlberg, Johnson, and Hannibal 2020). As this study

only utilizes community foundations as the study subject, future scholarly research is

warranted to investigate the sector diﬀerences between public and private foundations

in public engagement eﬀorts and how philanthropic organizations might diﬀer from

local governments, advocacy non-proﬁts, and human services non-proﬁts in their

capacities and mechanisms in facilitating public engagement and policy change.

Notes

1. Public foundations enjoy less operational restrictions as 501(c)(3) public charities in the U.S. (I.

R.C. §§ 4940 – 4948 2012)

2. Given the increased restrictions to access platform API after the infamous Cambridge

Analytica scandal, major platforms including Facebook have tightened up public access to

platform data (Freelon 2018). Because of the restricted access to Facebook data at the time of

conducting this research, this study is limited to collecting and analyzing Twitter data using

Twitter API through an authorized academic developer account.

Acknowledgement

The author thanks Chao Guo, Susan Phillips, Femida Handy, Ram Cnaan, Editor Stephen Osborne

and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on previous drafts of this

manuscript. Thanks also go to Adrienne Nunez and Ievgenii Demianov for their research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REVIEW 19

Notes on contributor

Viviana Chiu Sik Wu, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,

School of Public Policy. Using mixed methods and computational approaches, her work features the

emerging roles and unequal capacities of nonproﬁt and philanthropic organizations to advance public

problem solving online and oﬄine–through philanthropy, advocacy, and public engagement on social

media.

ORCID

Viviana Chiu Sik Wu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5692-3224

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Appendix 1

Code Book for Classifying Messages by Stakeholders and Purposes

(1) Coded as ‘Fundraising’ any messages directed at donors for:

●Fundraising and appeal

●Information and education about giving

●Facilitating donors’ and their ﬁnancial advisors’ individual charitable interests

●Appreciation and recognition for donations

(1) Coded as ‘Grantmaking’: any messages targeted at grantees/non-proﬁts for:

●The funding info (indicating areas of needs or ﬁelds of interests in grantmaking)

●Grant applications

●Managerial needs of charitable organizations (such as training and/or networking opportunities

for non-proﬁts)

●Promoting grantee’s work or recognizing grantee’s work

(1) Coded as ‘Relationship Building’: any messages directed at the community for:

●Small talks, motivational quotes, and seasons’ greetings

●Appreciation towards the general public or speciﬁc stakeholders

●Sharing community news and organizational announcement

(1) Coded as ‘Public Engagement’: any messages directed at involving the community for

improving community wellbeing or addressing policy problems:

(NOT for fundraising, grantmaking, or relationship building)

●Provide policy information on pressing community needs

●Disseminate civic education opportunities

●Convening civic dialogue, such as discussion forums

●Advocate policy ideas and lobby for policy issues

●Promote political and collective action such as voting and protests

●Volunteering and civic action

26 V. C. S. WU

Exploring Donor Influence and Public Engagement: Computational and Thematic Analyses of Social Media Messages

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Viviana Chiu Sik Wu

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 revealed that donor influence significantly varied the themes of public engagement tweets. Strong donor influence was significantly correlated with greater use of policy advocacy and public education messages but negatively correlated with public mobilization and dialogic messages. This study contributes to a growing line of research on donor control and provides important insights into the power dynamics among the triad of 212 community constituents, donors, and foundations.

Examining the Role of Social Media in Emergency Healthcare Communication: A Bibliometric Approach

Chapter

Oct 2022

Social media has been extensively used for the communication of health-related information and consecutively for the potential spread of medical misinformation. The aim of this study was to perform a bibliometric analysis of the current literature from Scopus database to discover the prevalent trends and topics related to communication regarding healthcare emergencies via social media. To accomplish this task, the research work has been carried in form of defending three research questions related to most impactful sources, most impactful publications and most impactful authors. The adopted methodology has been successful towards answering the research questions in the light of our collected dataset of Scopus articles.

Good Morning Chatbot, Do I Have Any Meetings Today? Investigating Trust in AI Chatbots in a Digital Workplace

Chapter

Oct 2022

The adoption and implementation of Conversational AI applications such as AI chatbots in the workplace is rapidly growing. The success of integrating AI chatbots into organisations critically depends on employees’ use since AI technology evolves through machine learning and analysis of use data. Since trust is a key aspect that determines technology continuous use, this research questions: How employees experience trust in Conversational AI and how it impacts its continuous use? To answer the research question, we conducted qualitative inductive research using rich empirical data from a large international organisation. The findings highlight that employees developed three forms of trust, namely, emotional, cognitive and organisational trust. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Community leadership as multi‐dimensional capacities: A conceptual framework and preliminary findings for community foundations

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Full-text available

Apr 2021

Viviana Chiu Sik Wu

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 multidimensional conceptual framework that construes community leadership in six capacities ranging from (a) strategizing, (b) convening, (c) knowledge building, (d) capacity building, (e) partnering, to (f) policy engagement. I applied this conceptual framework to analyze 539 annual reports of U.S. community foundations using semi‐automated content analysis. The empirical analysis shows that they tend to specialize in one or a few leadership capacities, but not necessarily all six components. In particular, the capability approach to community leadership through capacity building, partnering, and policy engagement is more favorable among community foundations than a participatory approach through convening and knowledge building. This article contributes to building the conceptual foundation and provides preliminary evidence to advance future research on the foundations' role in community leadership.

Crowdsourcing: Citizens as coproducers of public services

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Helen K. Liu

Crowdsourcing serves as a distributed problem‐solving production model for modern governments, and it has the potential to transform citizens into coproducers of public services. To consolidate the theoretical basis, this article provides a typology for crowdsourcing public services based on theories of coproduction, public sector volunteerism, and government–citizen relations. This typology includes two dimensions—the policy stage, and the functionality of citizens' effort—and four types of crowdsourcing, namely, complementary crowdsourcing in service implementation, supplementary crowdsourcing in service implementation, complementary crowdsourcing in policy and service design, and supplementary crowdsourcing in policy design. Four cases are selected for illustration. Designing crowdsourcing based on citizen and government relationships will help designers align goals and tasks to the right coproducers and enhance relationships in a democratic way. Furthermore, this typology will allow the field to systematically and collectively build knowledge.

Philanthropic Foundation Responses to COVID-19

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2020
NONPROF VOLUNT SEC Q

Philanthropic foundations are critical actors in the nonprofit sector—funding the programs of social and human service charities, fostering innovation, and serving as patrons of the arts. However, the dramatic growth of foundations and their endowments in recent decades has intensified charges of plutocracy—the claim that foundations are more interested in protecting their power and privilege than in contributing to the public good. The COVID-19 crisis has brought this critique into sharp focus, leading to the question, “How are large foundations acting to stem COVID-19’s impact and help in the process of recovery?” Our descriptive study leverages data from a nationwide survey of the 500 largest philanthropic foundations (by total assets) in the United States to characterize foundations’ (a) changes to internal strategy or giving, (b) shifts in relationships with grantee organizations, (c) prioritization of communities most affected by the COVID-19 crisis, and (d) collaboration across organizations and sectors.

Responding to Diffused Stakeholders on Social Media: Connective Power and Firm Reactions to CSR-Related Twitter Messages

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2021
J BUS ETHICS

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms—alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment.

Agenda-setting and Public Policy in Private Foundations

Article

Full-text available

Mar 2020

This paper examines advocacy, agenda-setting and the public policy focus of private philanthropic foundations in Australia. While concerns have been raised regarding advocacy and public policy influence of foundations in countries such as the U.S., less is understood on this issue in other contexts. Interviews were conducted with 11 managers and trustees of 10 Private Ancillary Funds (PAFs) in late 2014. Analysis of publicly available data on the participating PAFs was then undertaken comparing PAF information available at the time of the interviews with that available approximately five years later, to consider any changes in the public communication of their agendas. Findings reveal PAFs’ agendas were largely consistent with public policy but may vary in the approaches to address social causes. Further, a preference for privacy indicates the PAF sector may be characterised as ‘quiet philanthropy’ rather than having a visible public presence. As such, PAFs’ advocacy focused on promoting philanthropy, rather than altering or influencing public policy. Our main contention is that the conceptions of advocacy in structured philanthropy are dominated by the obvious, the outliers and the noisy. Our contribution to the philanthropic literature is a more nuanced and broader discussion of how advocacy and agenda-setting occurs and is understood in the mainstream.

Institutional intermediaries as legitimizing agents for social enterprise in China and India

Article

Jan 2021
PUBLIC MANAG REV

This study conducts a comparative analysis of social enterprise intermediaries in China and India to better understand how they legitimize social enterprises in new settings. To address theoretical weakness in this sphere, it combines several institutional theories to capture disruptions created by institutional innovation and also legitimizing processes. Drawing on data collected from surveys, interviews, and websites in each country, it finds that intermediaries mitigate negative and leverage positive influences of external institutions though their strategies vary due to country differences in institutional pressures. This information is key to building intermediaries’ capacity to institutionalize social enterprises as new institutional actors.

The Quest for Attention: Nonprofit Advocacy in a Social Media Age

Book

Oct 2020

Activating Community Resilience: The Emergence of COVID-19 Funds Across the United States

Article

Nov 2020
NONPROF VOLUNT SEC Q

This article draws upon concepts of community resilience to explore the antecedents of community philanthropic organizations’ response to COVID-19. Although the pandemic is a global threat, responses have been local. We test a model of community resilience activation in the context of the emergence of local COVID-19 funds. We find that a philanthropic organization’s capacity to act in a crisis and respond to the needs of the community depends on the stock of community capitals and organizational capacity. The importance of economic, cultural, and political factors in predicting the emergence of a fund raises important questions about disparities in resilience along class and race lines and the role of political ideology in shaping perceptions of crises. Our research contributes to our understanding of community philanthropic organizations’ capacity to activate community resources during a crisis.

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

Book

Jan 2016

The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American DemocracyUnequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy

Book

Apr 2012

Politically active individuals and organizations make huge investments of time, energy, and money to influence everything from election outcomes to congressional subcommittee hearings to local school politics, while other groups and individual citizens seem woefully underrepresented in our political system. This book is a comprehensive and systematic examination of political voice in America, and its findings are sobering. The book looks at the political participation of individual citizens alongside the political advocacy of thousands of organized interests—membership associations such as unions, professional associations, trade associations, and citizens groups, as well as organizations like corporations, hospitals, and universities. Drawing on numerous in-depth surveys of members of the public as well as the largest database of interest organizations ever created—representing more than 35,000 organizations over a 25-year period—this book conclusively demonstrates that American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality. The well-educated and affluent are active in many ways to make their voices heard, while the less advantaged are not. This book reveals how the political voices of organized interests are even less representative than those of individuals, how political advantage is handed down across generations, how recruitment to political activity perpetuates and exaggerates existing biases, how political voice on the Internet replicates these inequalities—and more. In a true democracy, the preferences and needs of all citizens deserve equal consideration. Yet equal consideration is only possible with equal citizen voice. This book reveals how far we really are from the democratic ideal and how hard it would be to attain it.

Beyond policy patrons: A ‘MADE’ framework for examining public engagement efforts of philanthropic foundations on Twitter

Abstract and Figures

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