Presentation at 4th European Communication Conference,Istanbul, October 2012. It shows the findings of an online survey carried out Q1 2012 under Dutch aid & development organisations assessing their social media use.

1. A quick overview of social media use by
Dutch aid & development NGOs
Anand Sheombar
Manchester Metropolitan University Business School (UK) & Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (NL)
e-mail anand.sheombar@gmail.com or Twitter @anandstweets
INTRODUCTION
Background for this research is the idea that ICT may have potential; benefits for
socio-economic development. This research area is called ICT for development (ICT4D)
and has grown in the last decades. A sub-area of interest in this research is the use of
social media. A definitions for social media is "a group of Internet-based applications
that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow
the creation and exchange of user-generated content“ (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010).
The idea for this research arose when I observed the intensive usage of social media
during an annual meeting of Dutch international aid and development agencies.
OBJECTIVES
For this quantitative study the research was focussed on the question How do Dutch aid
& development NGOs, that are already actively using social media, use social media for
their work? This was deconstructed in a series of questions that were measured
quantitatively, as shown hereafter.
DATA COLLECTION VIA ONLINE SURVEY From the development organisations 89% use Facebook and 91% have a Twitter
account. Also LinkedIn and YouTube were often used, 65% respectively 63%. Mobile
Data was retrieved Q1 2012 from the segmented groups that are the first adopting applications were not often used (6%) and a small percentage (9%) used other than the
social media usage in their organisation according to the technology adoption listed social media such as Ning, Yammer, Worknets or a self- developed social
lifecycle; cf. Rogers (1995). The population consists of Dutch civil society network.
organisations in the international development cooperation sector and its actual size
is 101 organisations (Partos, 2012), from which 80 are actively using social media.
Data collection was conducted via a (bi-lingual: Dutch & English) online survey. From
the 80 organisations that have been approached 54 have responded with filling in the
online survey (67.5% response rate).
FINDINGS
51.9% of the respondents used social media multiple times per day for work-related
purposes (there private use was also asked). Almost a quarter of the respondents
(24.1%) used social media a couple of times per week for work-related activities. The
mean age of the respondents was 34.5 years (SD =7.8 yr) from which 65% female and
35% male respondents. From the respondents 39% had a job in marketing &
communication, 20% were aid workers, 17% management and 17% mentioned other
functions, such as volunteer, researcher and fundraiser.
A majority of the development organisations (85%) used social media for targeting the
Dutch population. Interestingly 60% used social media to target other development
organisations. In the category other (19%) the development organisations mentioned
companies, Dutch government and politicians and international audience.
On Facebook 25% of the respondents used both private and organisational accounts
for work-related communication, followed by 14% only using their private account for
this kind of communication. Interestingly on Facebook (25%), Twitter (42.6%) and
LinkedIn (42.6%) of the respondents used both accounts for work-related
communication, whereas on YouTube 42.6% used the organisational account.
CONCLUSION
• Aid and development NGOs do make use of social media related to their work in
various ways.
• The respondents working at these organisations utilise some of the privately used
social media for work-related purposes.
• The profile of the respondents in the organisations do show a variety of functions
Almost all organisation use social media for informing their audience (96%). Branding but ICT is under-represented and the aid workers are present on social media but
is also import for most organisations (89%). Approximately half of the organisations not in a great number.
use social media for raising awareness (50%), mobilising (56%) and recruiting (48%).
• The majority of aid and development NGOs in this survey mostly did not use the
19% of the organisations have other reasons to use social media. They mentioned
most interactive functions of social media, nor considered any social media
reasons such as collaboration, knowledge dissemination, transparency and being found
(analytics) strategy. Rather, they perceived social media mainly as a tool for
on the social media.
information dissemination and branding.
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