Ani V. Ter-Mkrtchyan and Marshall A. Taylor, New Mexico State University
Social media is often referred to as the nervous system of our society. In a blink of an eye, it transmits various signals between its innumerable components. The nervous system also has a control function over our ability to move, breathe, see, and think.
Nonprofits, in addition to their higher public mobilization capacity, are also more likely to influence public perceptions on various policy issues due to their high credibility compared to pure public or private sectors. This means that people are more likely to base their opinions or form preferences grounded on the perspectives of the nonprofits they trust in both online and offline settings. These factors are particularly important considering how limited our attention is in the context of the Digital Age with its rapid technological change and abundant overflow of information. Inspired by the call for more research on the voluntary sector within the climate crisis context, our interest was to explore how environmental protection and conservation nonprofits are addressing the growing threat of climate change in their social media discourse.
What we did…
In our recently published NVSQ article, we tracked the emergence and evolution of climate change discourse among environmental protection and conservation nonprofits on Twitter, currently renamed as X, from 2008 to 2021. We included 120 organizations in our study, which we selected through stratified sampling to make sure we included environmental nonprofits of various sizes (small, medium and large) and geographic scopes of activity (regional, national, international). This also allowed us to examine how individual organizational characteristics and resources related to their social media behavior.
Analyzing the entire population of over 1.3 million published tweets from these organizations by using machine learning—specifically a form of natural language processing known as topic modeling—we were able to map their issue agendas on Twitter as it pertains to climate change and other environmental concerns for over a decade. We also determined the prevalence of climate change topics on these nonprofits ‘social media agendas and derived the proportion of discursive space consumed by these topics. In parallel, we collected these organizations’ mission statements from their public websites to compare the extent their “environmental subject of concern” identified in their mission is reflective of their Twitter issue agendas.
What we found…
Our comprehensive empirical overview shows that more than half of the topics these organizations discussed on Twitter were about climate change and almost half of the sampled organizations were highly likely to tweet on at least one subject regarding climate change. Other focal topics were related to environmental, wildlife, or forest protection, water conservation or were calls for recruiting volunteers or spreading healthy habits. We further observed that environmental nonprofits with and without a climate change focus in their mission tweet with equal frequency about climate change-related topics.
Our analysis of the temporal evolution of these tweet topics in general showed high levels of volatility across time. With an exception for a prominent climate change-related topic that calls for climate action, all other topics seem to display a cyclical nature of appearing to prominence, growing interest, then followed by a decline in online attention, and then back to prominence. For example, the topic related to climate science shows a spike in 2017 in connection with former U.S. President Trump’s announcement on U.S. withdrawal from the Paris accord. In contrast, the thematic evolution of tweets related to climate action topic from 2008 to 2021 went in parallel with major environmental policy milestones. Here we notice a spike of tweets in 2015 when the Paris Accord was signed, in 2017 when former President Trump reversed U.S. involvement in that agreement, in 2019 when the Green New Deal was proposed and in 2021 with President Biden’s commitment to Clean Energy Technologies. Climate action is a social movement, and this finding highlights what we know about social movements regarding their coupling with the stream of events in history and their relation to the development of public discourse about those events.
What we also observed is that smaller and medium sized organizations, as well as regional nonprofits, are less active in publishing tweets and have fewer followers. A reasonable explanation for this is that smaller organizations have less resources and thus less capacity to devote to their social media presence. This in turn, logically affects the attention their tweets get as opposed to larger organizations that have more followers and get more engagement with their tweet activity. Evidently, national nonprofits and those with higher program expenses are more active in posting tweets.
So what?
This bird’s eye view depiction of environmental nonprofit social media behavior is empirical and exploratory in nature. Our hope is that this study may serve as a springboard for future theory-driven scholarship as it can serve as a reference for scholars interested in these topics to easily identify from this population the subset of tweets they’d like to sample for analysis. For example, if a scholar is interested in the issue of climate change and environmental justice, in the article from Table 4 they can identify topic #22 and from Figure 4 they can observe that these tweets were at their peak in 2019. This way they can then focus their data collection efforts on that subsection of tweets. In this regard our published repository with replication files may also be come handy. The repository to replicate the analysis can be found here: https://github.com/Marshall-Soc/climate_nvsq Note, that Twitter/X restricts sharing full tweet data publicly. As such, the repository only contains tweet IDs—not the full tweets. Users will need to “rehydrate” the tweets in order to get access to the raw data used in our study. Descriptions on rehydrating Twitter data can be found here and here. As a matter of fact, with recent changes in ownership, leadership, and management of X (formerly Twitter), this historical account of ECPN behavior on Twitter may be considered a valuable by-product of this research.
Practically, the heightened engagement with climate change-related discourse by environmental organizations we observed, irrespective of whether climate change is a part of their mission, underscores their unanimous attempts to push government to climate action. This is particularly an important takeaway from our longitudinal assessment of topical issue agendas, considering the selective and strategic nature of organizations to focus on certain issues rather than others due to limits of both internal organizational and external environmental attention and resources.
Click here to read the full open access article: Ter-Mkrtchyan, A., & Taylor, M. (2023) “An Empirical Mapping of Environmental Protection and Conservation Nonprofit Discourse on Social Media.” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/08997640231202459
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