The power of emotions: engaging nonprofit stakeholders within Facebook

To sustain their mission, nonprofit organizations must dedicate time towards building, maintaining, and negotiating relationships with stakeholders. Social media adoption by nonprofit organizations outpaces for-profit organizations, and these platforms offer easy access and the ability to directly engage in communication with stakeholders. However, little is known about how stakeholders engage with messages sent by nonprofit organizations through social media platforms such as Facebook. This thesis seeks to examine the Facebook posts of Austin Pets Alive! for types of organizational messages and stakeholder responses to these organizational messages through a directed approach to qualitative content analysis. Austin Pets Alive! is a nonprofit organization which has been critical in the development of Austin, Texas as the largest no-kill city in the United States, euthanizing less than ten percent of incoming shelter animals annually. Lovejoy and Saxton's (2012) typology of organizational microblogging functions provides the framework for analysis. Findings suggest that nonprofit organizations should work to foster dialogue and directly engage their stakeholders within posts, as well as consider the emotional aspect of their messages, to build stronger organization-public relationships.