This research examines how and why members of the public are using technology to work with nonprofit organizations and begins to explore how new technologies might be designed to foster more productive partnerships between nonprofit organizations and the public. Mobile information and communication technologies have fundamentally changed the nature of grassroots organizing, enabling members of the public to rapidly and flexibly organize themselves in order to accomplish a variety of goals. However, nonprofit organizations have often failed to leverage the public's innovative and civically-engaged uses of technology for their benefit. This research will undertake two synergistic lines of inquiry to address such issues, one consisting of empirical research, and the other developing design principles.
A three-phase empirical study will examine the role of technologies in fostering partnerships between the public and nonprofits. The first phase will explore the use of social media, a technology foregrounding social context, for online advocacy. The second will examine distributed work technologies, predominantly foregrounding temporal context, for virtual volunteering. The third will investigate the use of mobile technologies, foregrounding physical context, for mobile giving. Each phase will be motivated by the same high-level research questions, allowing synthesis across phases and generalization about the role of technology in bridging between the public and nonprofit organizations.
In the design inquiry, a series of low-fidelity and medium-fidelity prototypes will be developed that embody design recommendations derived from the empirical inquiry, taking advantage of new permutations of social, physical and temporal contexts. A series of focus groups and design workshops will provide feedback to help guide iteration on the design of the prototypes.
This research will provide empirical evidence of how technologies used for online advocacy, virtual volunteering and mobile giving influence the dynamics between nonprofit organizations and members of the public. It will advance theoretical knowledge about the role of nonprofits in a changing technological landscape of public civic engagement. This research will also derive theory about the roles of social, physical, and temporal contexts in civically-engaged technology use.
Understanding the way that members of the public are using technology to work with nonprofit organizations is critical for fostering and designing technologies to support productive partnerships moving forward. This research also provides an opportunity for students to participate in civically engaged scholarship, the kind of scholarship that has been shown to attract the participation of minorities in computing disciplines.
