Social media adoption and digital literacy in small third sector organisations

This paper is concerned with the ways in which social media are adopted by small not-for-profit organisations in the third sector in the UK. It explores the ways in which these organisations use social media and the factors which influence the adoption of the tools. The analysis is based on an empirical study carried out in the county of Kent, Southeast of England between 2012 and 2014. The study involved a survey of small third sector organisations first implemented in 2012 (n=53) and then repeated in 2014 (n=54), as well as four focus groups with managers and employees of these organisations conducted over the period. Thus, the analysis involved both quantitative and qualitative data.
The paper examines two specific questions. First, how social media is used by these organisations, the purposes as well as the patterns of uses. As the survey was repeated after two years, the data analysis will also reveal how social media use changed over that period of time. Second, the study also examines what factors have influenced how social media is used and adopted by small third sector organisations, and what the prevailing perceptions are about these tools among the organisations included in the data collection. In order to address the research questions the paper applies the notion of digital literacy to study organisations and argues that it is a useful concept to explore digital transformations of organisations.