After the 2011, and then 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Reports came out, we decided to do some reporting of our own. It’s great that the number of nonprofits on social media continues to rise, but how many of the 1.5 million out there are actually involved?

If you missed it, we did some research in March and selected 100 random nonprofits from the available IRS data, and searched for a website, Facebook page, and Twitter account for each. We started with the database of all registered nonprofits and used SQL to select 100 random rows.

As part of some ongoing efforts looking related to uncovering data for nonprofits on the web and social media, we upped our sample size to 1,000 organizations to get more accurate results. You might notice that the percentages below are lower than we reported from the group of 100.  That is probably due to changes in how we considered regional or chapter organizations rather than a national or state-wide parent organization.  We looked at two pages of Google or Bing search results for the organization’s name, and then performed additional searches filtering the results by site to find facebook.com / twitter.com pages.  Each potential match was manually reviewed and only counted if the page was specific to the organization.  We’re happy to talk more about our methodology if anyone’s curious.

Without further ado: Here are the percentages of nonprofits in our random sample for whom we could find a website, Facebook page, or Twitter profile.

• Website: 43.4%

• Facebook: 28.2%

• Twitter: 10.0%

These results are very different from what the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Report found. We talk about the possible reasons why in this post: See Something, Say Something, Do Something.

We’ve continued to reach out to lots of other organizations and thinkers in the industry, seeing who else might be studying these issues, but there isn’t too much out there. In result, we’re continuing to work on covering the whole database of nonprofits. More to come! We’ll keep you posted.

Learn more about our first round of research here: Nonprofits and Social Media: Check Your Facts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2012 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Commentary, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.