Communication Strategies and Social Media Use by German Foundations

The study investigates communication strategies by German foundations. This study is inspired by a discrepancy between the aim to create public good pursued by philanthropies and their financial independence and freedom to push their own goals. Despite this independence, foundations are important public actors with their own political agenda. Furthermore, their activity is often supported with the public funds and tax benefits that require transparency and profound communication work to justify their activities to the general public. The project attempts to clarify philanthropies’ own understanding of communication work and goals they pursue in their communication with the general public. Particular attention in this study is paid to the use of social media tools known as a relatively cheap and accessible communication medium available to all civil society actors. Previous scholarship has stressed relatively low use of social media by philanthropic organisations. Nonetheless, a number of German foundations support active presence in the most popular social networking sites including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube. Our study attempts to analyse and explain the use of social media focusing on Twitter accounts of philanthropic organisations. At the same time, it takes a broader look at social media presence as a part of general communication strategy undertaken by philanthropic organisations. The design of the study is based on a mixed methods approach. At the first stage, Twitter networks of selected philanthropic organisations were investigated with the help of NodeXL Pro software. At the second stage, discrepancies in social network analysis were explained through the qualitative interviews with the organisations’ representatives. Hence, the result of this study presents not only a snapshot of social media use, but also discovers the underlying rationale and strategies of public communication by foundations.