Refining Audience Engagement: Leveraging Text-based Audience Comments as an Evolution Metric in Small 501(c)(3) Advocacy-Focused Nonprofits

Abstract

This study examines how small, Los Angeles-based, advocacy-focused nonprofit organizations (NPOs) use Facebook to engage audiences through information sharing, calls for action, and community-building. More importantly, it explores text-based audience comments—a novel metric for measuring audience engagement in social media studies in advocacy-focused nonprofit organizations (advocacy-NPOs). Rather than relying solely on traditional metrics (e.g., frequency of “likes,” “comments,” and “shares” of NPO-generated posts), we analyzed user-generated content such as text-based audience comments to capture nuanced engagement as well as audience preferences and interactions. The findings reveal that NPO-generated posts prioritized Information (92%) and Action (71.3%) categories, with limited focus on the Community. By contrast, text-based audience comments were most common in the Community category (80.3%), with frequent replies to NPOs including expressions of gratitude and demonstrations of support. This discrepancy between NPOs’ organizational posts emphasis on Information and audiences’ preference for community underscores the importance of peer interaction and social bonding as primary motivators for engagement. Additionally, both NPO-generated posts and text-based audience comments contained advocacy-focused content, so this pattern reflects alignment between organizational missions and audience interests. These insights can help advocacy-NPOs develop practical strategies to enhance their social media impact and strengthen audience engagement.