Anna Priante (Erasmus University Rotterdam)

“Mo” Together or Alone? Investigating the Role of Fundraisers’ Networks in Online Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

In online peer-to-peer fundraising, individual fundraisers, acting on behalf of nonprofit

Online peer-to-peer (P2P) fundraising is a form of fundraising in which individual fundraisers, acting on behalf of nonprofit organizations, mobilize their social networks via social media to ask for donations. While existing studies focus on networks of donors to explain success, we examine the role of the networks of fundraisers, and how such network relations affect fundraising outcomes. By drawing upon social capital and network theories, we investigate how social capital derived from social media networks and group fundraising participation explains individual fundraising success. Using the Movember health campaign on Twitter as an empirical context, we find that fundraising success is associated with moderate level of centrality in social media networks and moderate group network size. Additionally, we find that social media are marginally used for interactions between fundraisers, who rather connect outside those platforms. Our paper contributes to research on fundraising and social networks in the nonprofit sector and provide recommendations about the best practices in online P2P fundraising.

This is joint work with Michel L. Ehrenhard (University of Twente), Tijs van den Broek (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ariana Need (University of Twente) and Djoerd Hiemstra (Radboud University).

Frank Takes (Leiden University)

Population-scale social network analysis

This talk considers responsibly anonymized population-scale social network data on all 17 million inhabitants of the Netherlands.
The data is sourced from country-wide administrative register data, enabling the discovery of population-scale insights into a society.
I will show how the analysis of a population-scale multilayer network of family, work, school, household and neighborhood relations enables us to revisit the well-known small-world phenomenon from a unique angle.
Moreover, I discuss how the type of formal links in this social network require one to critically rethink network analysis concepts such as the unit of analysis, measurement errors effects and the boundary specification problem.