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47 Nonprofit & Voluntary Sector Q. 5 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/npvolsq47 and id is 1 raw text is: Article Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 2018, Vol. 47(l) 5-26 Speaking and Being Heard: @ The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: How Nonprofit Advocacygepub.com/ournalsPermissions.nav DOl: 10.1s177/0899764017713724 Organizations Gain Attention journasagepub.com/home/nvs on Social Media OSAGE Chao Guol and Gregory D. Saxton2 Abstract The social media era ushers in an increasingly noisy information environment that renders it more difficult for nonprofit advocacy organizations to make their voices heard. How then can an organization gain attention on social media? We address this question by building and testing a model of the effectiveness of the Twitter use of advocacy organizations. Using number of retweets and number of favorites as proxies of attention, we test our hypotheses with a I 2-month panel dataset that collapses by month and organization the 219,915 tweets sent by 145 organizations in 2013. We find that attention is strongly associated with the size of an organization's network, its frequency of speech, and the number of conversations it joins. We also find a seemingly contradictory relationship between different measures of attention and an organization's targeting and connecting strategy. Keywords advocacy, attention, nonprofit organizations, social media, Twitter In just over 10 years, social media have arguably become both the best ally and worst enemy of nonprofit organizations in their effort to advocate for the people and com- munities they serve. Regarded by some as a microphone for the masses (Murthy, 2011), a voice for the people (Wattam, 2009), or cyberactivism (McNutt & Menon, 2008), social media offer an alternative broadcast and communication medium for 'University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA 2York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Corresponding Author: Chao Guo, School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania, 3701 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. Email: chaoguo@upenn.edu