NGOs are ditching formal reports for social media to prove their impact
A new study of Red Cross posts reveals how nonprofits now account for their work through personal stories and real-time updates on Facebook, rather than annual reports. This shift could reshape donor expectations and force NGOs to rethink how they measure and communicate performance to funders and the public.
Originaltitel: Beyond proxy: principles of NGO accounts of performance on social media
<p>In response to heightened accountability pressures, NGOs increasingly use social media to account for their performance, yet little is known about the characteristics of these accounts. Given social media's unique characteristics as a forum for accountability, such as rapidness, multimodality, and multivocality, they could reshape how performance is accounted for compared to conventional fora such as annual reports. Our purpose is to explore the key principles underpinning NGOs' accounts of performance on social media. By applying classical rhetoric (ethos, pathos, and logos) and visual semiotics as a conceptual framework, we conducted a close reading of the Swedish Red Cross's accounts of performance on Facebook in 2021 (77 posts in total) and compared them with the 2021 annual report. The analysis reveals five principles that distinguish accounts of performance on social media from conventional accounting: extended narratorship, individualisation, temporal proximity, visual modality, and serialisation. Together, these principles reflect accounting through lived experience rather than by proxy, which challenges the norms of framing performance in both accounting in general and from an NGO accountability perspective.</p>