Comparing Nonprofit Usage of Social Networks and Text Messaging in Korea and the United States: One Size Does Not Fit All

Submitted by Annaliese on Tue, 07/12/2011 - 9:09am
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Last week, my new colleague, Amanda, introduced the Daum Foundation, a Korean-based foundation helping Korean nonprofits use digital media more effectively for their causes. (Sound familiar?) Daum and NTEN will be sharing resources with our respective communities. I'd like to kick things off by taking a closer look at some of the findings from the research they already shared with us.

According to Daum's 2010 survey of 500 Korean nonprofits, text messaging is a widely-adopted communications channel for nonprofit PR purposes, while few Korean nonprofits are using social networks for that purpose.

It immediately struck me that this is the reverse of channel usage for U.S. nonprofits, so I decided to compare the numbers:

Note that the "0" for Text Messaging usage by U.S. nonprofits is really a "?". In trying to locate this number, I realized there isn't any reporting yet on the adoption of text messaging for communications purposes by U.S. nonprofits. But this alone suggests that the adoption is likely very small.*

There are many known factors accounting for the difference in communications practices between nonprofits operating primarily in the U.S. and nonprofits operating primarily outside of the U.S., including differences between communications infrastructures and economic factors. But there are two key take-aways from these findings:

  • Nonprofits interested in growing their support base beyond the U.S. should take note of the communications trends in their target growth areas. A communications channel that works well for U.S. audiences may not work well for other audiences.
  • U.S. based nonprofits can likely learn quite a bit from nonprofit and charitable organizations based elsewhere (and vice versa). As we say quite a bit around here, there's no need to "reinvent the wheel" when it comes to adopting new channels and practices that are already being used heavily elsewhere -- but we may need to translate the instructions on how to use the wheel! Collaboration and resource-sharing between organizations around the globe is an important need.

We're excited to be kicking off this new relationship with the Daum Foundation, especially in the light of these two considerations!

* There are some benchmarks around usage statistics among specific organizaitons, but no reporting on the general adoption of Mobile and SMS channels in the broader nonprofit sector. See these reports: 2011 eBenchmarks Report from M+R and NTEN (includes some Text Messaging statistics collected from research subjects), and the 2010 Mobile Benchmarks Report from M+R and MobileActive (again, shares specific statistics about usage by select research group).