An Approach to Exploring Non-Governmental Development Organizations Interest Groups on Facebook

Abstract

This paper presents an approach for analyzing the stakeholders from various organizations based on their Facebook activity. On a practical level, the proposed approach has been applied in two of the Non-Governmental Development Organizations (NGDOs) with the largest number of delegations in the province of Cadiz: Red Cross Cadiz, and Caritas Asidonia Jerez. The purposes of the research are to describe the management of marketing activities on Facebook; to identify the network stakeholders, their roles in the communication, and the community generating factors; and to position organizations according to their leadership, activity, and popularity in the network. This study used a mixed-methods research design, combining personal interviews and Social Network Analysis (SNA). The SNA provided insights into the various ways the analyzed NGDOs are active on Facebook, the roles they play in communication, and how communities are generated. Moreover, the SNA made it possible to visualize the interactions between organizations and their stakeholders within the Facebook environment using the Gephi software package. Two factors that generate communities were detected in the results: the organization’s nature and its geographical location. Moreover, two solutions were proposed to determine the organizations’ positioning according to their roles in communication. Consequently, two maps were created, a two-dimensional map with the activity and popularity of the parameters, which shows that just because an NGDO is active does not mean it is popular (in terms of receiving “likes”), and a second three-dimensional graph to which a leadership parameter was added. In this last map, four groups of important actors can be seen, with one group formed by the organizations with the best ratings on the three dimensions, and the other three with a low level of leadership in common but who were different in terms of the popularity and activity dimensions.