Paper ID: 2210.11322

The Effectiveness of Social Media Engagement Strategy on Disaster Fundraising

Vivek Velivela, Chahat Raj, Muhammad Salman Tiwana, Raj Prasanna, Mahendra Samarawickrama, Mukesh Prasad

Social media has been a powerful tool and an integral part of communication, especially during natural disasters. Social media platforms help nonprofits in effective disaster management by disseminating crucial information to various communities at the earliest. Besides spreading information to every corner of the world, various platforms incorporate many features that give access to host online fundraising events, process online donations, etc. The current literature lacks the theoretical structure investigating the correlation between social media engagement and crisis management. Large nonprofit organisations like the Australian Red Cross have upscaled their operations to help nearly 6,000 bushfire survivors through various grants and helped 21,563 people with psychological support and other assistance through their recovery program (Australian Red Cross, 2021). This paper considers the case of bushfires in Australia 2019-2020 to inspect the role of social media in escalating fundraising via analysing the donation data of the Australian Red Cross from October 2019 - March 2020 and analysing the level of public interaction with their Facebook page and its content in the same period.

Submitted: Oct 19, 2022