Building Organisation-Community Relationships in Co-Creative Social Networking Platforms: An Ecological Systems Perspective

Abstract

Nonprofit organisations use social networking platforms to interact, engage, and build productive relationships with target audiences for co-created outcomes. This chapter pursues two interrelated objectives: First, it identifies key stages in the growth of organisation-community relationships on co-creative social networking platforms. Second, it discusses the multi-levelled factors influencing these relationships at the respective stages. To achieve these objectives, we make a general review of scholarship on nonprofit use of social media, social networking platforms for co-creation, and organisation-public relationships on social media. We used the ecological systems perspective to identify the internal and external environmental influences on organisational relationships in social networking platforms. This chapter presents three abstract stages of organisation-community relationships: emergence, growth, and collapse, based on existing empirical observations and theoretical perspectives. We reveal four levels of ecological-based factors that influence different stages of organisation-community relationships on co-creative social networking platforms. We indicate the potentially strong and weaker influences on organisational relationships.