SAMPLE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

How are UK charities using online social networking in their fundraising efforts?

• What are the main reasons that motivated your charity to join Facebook? • What are your objectives in using Facebook now – please list in order of

significance.

• What other social media do you use and which one is the most important to

you at the minute?

• How many staff members does your social media team comprise of and

which department do they sit in?

• How do you feel about your Facebook page today?

• What more would you like to do with Facebook – and what is stopping you

from doing it?

• Do you actively try to maximize your number of Facebook fans? If so, how? • Do you have a social media hyperlinking strategy? If so, could you briefly

explain some of the reasons behind linking with other individuals/organisations in your Facebook communication?

• In your opinion, what new developments in communication technology hold

the most promise for charity fundraising? What works and

what is

counterproductive in SNS

fundraising?

• In your opinion, what giving model works best on Facebook? Please give

an example.

• What are your thoughts on the recent No Make-up Selfie campaign? What,

in your opinion, made it so successful and what lessons have you learnt from it? How is social capital operationalized in the context of charity SNS fundraising and how can this be explained theoretically?

Investment:

• Please describe briefly any strategies you have in place (if any) for building

successful social relationships with your fans.

Mobilisation:

• Please describe any incentives (if any) that you offer to your fans for

sharing your posts.

Outcome realisation:

• How important is your Facebook page in fundraising (if at all) compared to

other, more traditional fundraising tools? Please explain and give an example, if possible.

• How important are your Facebook fans to your organisation and why? Conversion:

• (IF YOU HAVE ROI FIGURES) What is the total value of your annual

investment in Facebook – including staff hours, technical support, advertising etc.?

• (IF YOU HAVE ROI FIGURES) What is the return on this investment? • (IF YOU HAVE ROI FIGURES) Please explain how you work out the return

to your Facebook investment and how you predict this figure when planning your fundraising campaigns.

A common criticism of qualitative interviews is that they do not allow

generalizability of the findings because the number of subjects interviewed is too small. However, the purpose of this interview study was to obtain detailed information about a little-understood phenomenon, so the researcher took the advice of Kvale (1996, p. 101) and interviewed “as many subjects as

necessary to find out what you need to know”. When the last few interviews produced no new insights, it was decided that the answers obtained were enough to answer the research questions posed by the thesis.

A copy of a request for participation email sent to prospective interviewees and the question guide for the interviews are included in Appendix 2 and Appendix 3 of this thesis respectively.

4.4.4 SURVEY

Embedded within each case study was also a survey questionnaire, which, according to Creswell (2003, p. 153), “provides a quantitative or numeric description of trends, attitudes, or opinions of a population by studying a sample of that population”. Creswell (2003) adds that this method is used to collect quantitative data about the studied sample that can then be

generalized to the entire population. Although a survey is an unusual method of data collection for a case study, it does work when the data collected is analysed as just one component of the overall assessment of the case (Yin, 1994). This is different from using a case study in conjunction with a survey, where the former aims to explore – and the latter explain – a phenomenon (Gable, 1994).

Conducted online, the survey aimed to discover facts about and analyse the behaviour of people who interacted with charities’ posts by either liking or sharing them. Fans who interact with posts, especially by sharing them on their Facebook walls, are very valuable to charities. A successful post can be shared by hundreds or even thousands of followers, helping to diffuse the message from the charity’s immediate circle of online relations to a much wider and more diverse audience. The questionnaire was used to analyse the motivations, intentions and perceived rewards of the people who liked or shared posts in order to assess what works and what is counterproductive in SNS fundraising and explore whether – and how – social capital is at work. It was also used to investigate whether the fans who liked or shared posts were mostly people who had offline relations with the charities, or if they constituted a new, untapped resource. The question of whether charities are nurturing existing social relations or creating new ones with their Facebook

engagement is a crucial one in the discussion of social capital in online social networks. The questions were informed by various studies in social media use (most notably Whiting & Williams’s 2013 study on why people use social media, and Kang et al.’s 2014 study on customer-restaurant relationships on Facebook), persuasion (including Flynn & Lake, 2008; Fogg, 2008 and Cialdini, 2007), and social capital (including Bourdieu, 1986, Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998, and Portes, 1998).

should have a good idea of what answers to expect at the outset (Gable, 1994). Buckingham and Saunders (2004, pp. 61-63) advise researchers to identify their key concepts and variables before starting to develop questions. They define concepts as “mental categories” that enable us to “recognize things, sort them into groups and generalize about them”. A “variable” is “a quantity of something which has at least two different possible values”, and which we need to measure in order to operationalize a concept. In this research, a number of key concepts and variables were identified at the outset, informed mainly by the parameters of social capital presented in Figure 3.1 and by the literature review on fundraising. These are presented in Table 4.6 below, while the questionnaire is included in full in Appendix 4 of this thesis.