How Social Media Marketing Affects Assessment Answer

Chapter 1 Introduction: 

Background:

The non-profit organizations function to offer services to the society and the communities. Their business motive is not to make profits through earning revenues but to offer humanitarian and benevolent services to the society in times of need. These organizations depend on the donors those are the external resources from where the funds are raised by these organizations for undertaking their various societal activities and services. The donors can be of various types such as individuals, foundations, government grants or gifts and corporate establishments. But, the majority of the revenues come from the individual donors. The non-profit organization that has been chosen for the purpose of this research study is CARE that is Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere. It is an institution that serves the world with humanitarian acts with the main objective of eliminating poverty. The organization is committed to deliver the best possible services to the communities worldwide in times of emergency situations such as natural calamities of man-made disasters those affect the life of the people (CARE, 2018).
The organization endeavors to save the lives of the people around the world, reduce poverty and attain the social justice for the under-privileged communities in particular. The establishment is dedicated to offering the world a ray of hope in terms of being tolerant to people belonging to every social class and religion and ensuring the prevalence of social justice, with the wish that poverty is overcome in every corner of the globe and it is possible for the people to live a secured and dignified life. The main focus of CARE is the women and girls because unless there is societal equitability between the males and females across different communities in this world, it is not possible to eliminate poverty. In order to promote its various activities across the globe, the organization has adopted various methods of advertising and promotions, the social media being the most effective and widely used medium of promoting the activities of the organization (GAUSS, 2018).

Problem Statement:

The problem which the research has sought to resolve is the impact of the social media marketing on the revenues those are earned by CARE from the donations received from the various agencies and institutions. In this regard it can be said that the social media has become one of the most effective methods of promoting the products and services of the organizations belonging to different sectors. The advantage of the use of social media is that it helps to spread the message of the products and services of an organization to a large section of the customers within a very short span of time. The social media is nowadays used by a large number of people across the world for viewing the various products and services that they want to receive from the different corporate establishments (Malcolm, 2016).
The use of social media in promoting the various activities and services is a common practice now for the profit-making as well as the non-profit making organizations. The focus of this research is on the use of the social media marketing by the non-profit making organizations and the ways these organizations have been able to enhance their revenues by using the social media. This particular study seeks to determine the impacts on the revenues of the non-profit organizations those work in different parts of the world with various purposes such as offering relief and emergency services and also undertaking actions to empower the women rights and other activities. CARE has been used as the organization for the case study analysis in this research project.

Significance of the Study:

The non-profit organizations play a variety of roles across several nations and also in their countries of origin. These organizations not only offer the humanitarian services but also use their authorities to bring various other unidentified non-profit concerns in front of the public by either implementing formal advocacy or through announcement of public service campaigns those are less formal in nature. The non-profit organizations work on the basis of the funds raised on various occasions such as special events like solicitations through telephones, direct mailing, public relations and other marketing activities in which the use of the social media has become one of the most effective tools. The non-profit organizations often do not have the required financial or human resources for the purpose in order to control and monitor the social media activities full time. The non-profit organizations must use the social media prudently and must align their strategies along with the social media usage of their major stakeholders. These organizations also need to consider the changes in the effectiveness of the current marketing and advertising strategies after they have planned to use the social media as the major tool of conducting its activities as well as for the objective of promoting its various services to the society (F.Bernritter, W.J.Verlegh and G.Smit, 2016).
 The modern non-profit organizations such as CARE utilize the social media not only for the purpose of promoting their services, mission and objectives but also for the purpose of collecting donations. Therefore, it is expected that the said research will act as a foundation to the other future researches those might be undertaken on determining the impacts of the social media on the revenues of non-profit organizations. It has been observed generally, that the use of the social media for the purpose of promotion and advertising as well as for collecting donations has been extremely positive and profitable on the organizations such as CARE and the majority of these organizations have been able to enhance their donations and funds by undertaking their activities through the social media marketing.

Research Objectives:

The objectives of the said research can be enumerated as follows:
To determine the role played by the social media in promoting the services of a non-profit organization
To identify the purposes for which a non-profit organizations uses the social media platforms
To analyze the effectiveness of the social media in enhancing the revenues of the non-profit organizations
To identify the roles played by CARE in offering its services across the globe to the communities in need
To find out the ways in which the social media is used by CARE for the purpose of promoting its activities and services across the world
To determine the part played by social media marketing in enabling CARE to secure donations from various organizations and individuals
To assess the impact that the social media marketing and promotions have on the revenues earned by CARE
To identify whether the use of the social media platform is a prudent strategy for CARE in future also
To assess the various unexplored areas where the social media can be used by CARE to enhance its reach and effectiveness of services to the global communities

Research Scope:

The scope of the research consisted of analyzing the role played by the social media marketing in impacting the revenues generated by the non-profit organizations. The research has conducted a review of literature on the importance of the social media in modern business contexts. The research encompassed studying the impact of the social media on the non-profit organizations in general. The modern non-profit organizations are using the social media more effectively and they are investing significantly behind strengthening the infrastructure by undertaking the implementations of the modern Information and Communications Technology frameworks so that they can undertake the social media activities with much ease and the objectives of the organizations are achieved successfully. The research has also encompassed the strategies those are being undertaken by the modern non-profit organizations to ensure that the services of the organization are based more on the use of the social media so that the required message is passed on to the stakeholders within the shortest possible time frame. In understanding the effectiveness of the social media marketing on enhancing the revenues of a non-profit organization, the case study of CARE has been selected. CARE is one of the most reputed non-profit organizations in the world that offers various humanitarian services to the various communities such as the poor and underprivileged. 
It also offers other services such as initiatives to establish rights and empowerment of the girl children and women. It also provides various kinds of relief and emergency services across the globe in disaster-hit regions. The organization also undertakes activities for eliminating hunger in the poor countries. Thus, the use of social media has been prudently chosen by CARE in order to promote its wide array of humanitarian services to various communities across the world. Nowadays, the people can understand about the mission and goals of the organization by visiting the official website of CARE and also the social media accounts it has on Facebook and Twitter. This has not only helped in wide reach to the target audience but also enhanced the donations available to the organization from the various resources. Thus, the research scope was more focused on how the revenues of CARE are affected by the social media promotions and marketing.

Thesis Statement:

The thesis statement for the said research has been as follows:
The social media has enhanced the connection of CARE with the target audiences and helped the organization to promote its activities further and receive more donations from various resources that ultimately contributes to the growth, development and sustainability of the organization in the long run.

Research Questions:

The research has asked the following questions and the answers have been sought through the analysis of the data collected:
What is the role played by social media in marketing and promotions in modern organizations?
What is the role of a non-profit organization?
How do social media impact the marketing and promotions of a non-profit organization?
How has been the impact of social media marketing on CARE in terms of reaching out to the target audiences?
Has the social media marketing and promotions enhanced the revenues earned by CARE through donations and fund raisers?
Will it be prudent for CARE to invest more in social media activities for future growth and sustainability?

Limitations:

One of the major limitations of the said research has been its focus on only one non-profit organization that is CARE. This organization deals with offering various kinds of benevolent services to the communities on global scale. Its main activities include providing help to improve the quality of education of the poor people, especially the empowerment of girls the women. The organization is also concerned with the offering of relief services to the nations in case of any emergencies such as natural or man-made disasters. So, the scope of research is limited to the activities of CARE only and there can be various other types of social works those are being undertaken by numerous other non-profit organizations those are not being considered in case of this research. The other limitations of the research consisted of the time and the budget constraints due to which it was not possible to be conducted on a much bigger scale. In course of the research the primary data collection procedure was also observed in order to gather the responses of the staffs who are working for CARE. It was difficult to get the approval of the research initially as the management did not approve of visiting the premises and interviewing or surveying the workers, staffs and volunteers of the organization. However, after convincing the management authorities about the purpose of the research study and the benefits it will offer to the community and also to the organization, the management authorities finally provided them the opportunity of conducting the interview with one of the managers and surveys with some of the staffs and workers of the organization. As a part of the research, 10 donors of CARE where also surveyed through online distribution of questionnaires to some of the institutional donors and through face-to-face distribution of survey questionnaires to some individual donors from Nigeria. In spite of these limitations, the research was undertaken and completed with the expected results and outcomes successfully.

Conceptual Framework:

The conceptual framework consists of the various stages of the research that forms the basic structure of the research study. For this particular research, the conceptual framework consisted of the following stages:
1.Acceptance of the Research Proposal.
2.Undertaking a literature review on the research topic wherefrom substantial knowledge and information was gathered on developing the knowledge base for the said research.
3.A qualitative data collection was conducted with the help of interview of one of the Sales Managers of the organization.
4.The qualitative data was analyzed to appear at the findings.
5.Then a quantitative data collection procedure was implemented through surveys of some of the marketing and advertising executives in the organization.
6.Thereafter, an analysis of the quantitative data was undertaken with the help of MS Excel that depicted the results in the form of graphs, charts and tables.
7.The findings of the quantitative data analysis were interpreted and logical conclusions were arrived at.
8.Finally, the recommendations were offered based on the findings from the qualitative and quantitative data analyses.
The conceptual framework of the research can be diagrammatically represented as follows.

Chapter 2 Literature Review: 

According to Rouse (2018), the social media marketing is one of the strategies in marketing that takes into account the use of internet and social networking sites as major tools of marketing. The main aim of social media marketing is to develop the contents that the users could share with the respective social network to help the business houses to increase the exposure of their brands and to expand their reach to the customers. In this respect it is important to understand the elements of social media marketing that include the social media optimization or SMO. The strategy of SMO is very similar to that of SEO or search engine optimization tactics where unique and new visitors are attracted towards the websites. In case of SMO the sites of the social networking can be linked with the contents that the business enterprises want to communicate (Lee, 2013). The sharing buttons and RSS are major elements of this strategy. The activities can also be promoted through the platform of social media where the statuses can be updated or through the posts of the blogs or social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook Google + etc. The business organizations find the SMM or social media marketing profitable and effective as it connects the customers with the companies directly where the interactions can take place through the sharing of messages or feedbacks. There are interactive sections in the social media platforms where the customers can communicate with the companies’ executives and they can either place their queries or can place complaints. This empowers the customers and the companies remain on the profitable side with the use of this marketing tool (Ioan?s and Stoica, 2014).
Moreover it can be said that the various social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook Google +, LinkedIn etc. gave made the strategies of SMM popular among the business organizations (Hajli, 2011). The increased popularity of the social media and social networking sites in the last few years have contributed to the use of this strategy as one of the major tools of marketing by the business organizations where the communication with the target customers and the cost-effectiveness both can be achieved conveniently by the business organizations (Rouse, 2018).
In the opinion of Ward (2016), the social marketing media is one of the strategies of the marketers of the companies where the target markets can be interacted via the different sites of the social media. The social media sites and platforms include the popular sites of Facebook, Instagram Twitter and Pinterest and many more. The use of You Tube for the promotion of the videos or contents of marketing has become very popular. The companies are come up with the different concepts of social media marketing to achieve the objectives which are based on the traditional beliefs and goals of the companies. The marketing goals of the companies remain the same just the ways of marketing the contents with the aim of achieving the maximum reach to the customers (Ioan?s and Stoica, 2014). The major marketing objectives include the enhancement of referrals, increase of sales leads, creating word-of-mouth, increase the sales of the deliverables of the companies, providing the means of feedbacks, development of the goodwill being an expert, attract more people towards the website or blogs of the companies, increase development of new deliverables including products and services and to inform people (Rantic, 2017). The information to be provided to the people is one of the major objectives of the marketers behind the social media marketing. The customer service is another important area that has become the core of marketing strategies. The popular platforms of the social media include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Google Plus +, LinkedIn etc. It is highly important for the businesses that they choose either any single platform or multiple platforms depending on the financial resources they have and could invest towards the social media marketing (Assaad and Gómez, 2011 ). The companies have to focus on the efforts they put to achieve the social media marketing objectives. The majority of the companies are now using social media marketing strategies so that they could enhance their reach and the cost-effectiveness. It has been observed that the social media marketing have been able to fetch the required amount of revenues or returns from the marketing efforts (Ward, 2016).