[ecrea] report on social engagement, civil society and online media

The King Baudouin Foundation has just published the report “Social 
engagement, civil society and online media”, authored by Nico 
Carpentier, with the assistance of Tereza Pavlícková, Giulia Airaghi, 
Silvia Bertolotti, Liesbeth Merckx en Itir Akdogan. The report is 
available in Dutch and French, and can be dowloaded via the links 
mentioned below. In this email (and in both reports), an English summary 
has also been included.

Sociaal engagement, maatschappelijk middenveld en online media (in Dutch)
Free to download from: 
http://www.kbs-frb.be/publication.aspx?id=309904&langtype=2067

Engagement social, société civile et médias en ligne (in French)
Free to download from: 
http://www.kbs-frb.be/publication.aspx?id=309904&langtype=2060

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A summarizing reflection on the research project “Social engagement, 
civil society and online media”

Online media are often viewed as the solution to all kinds of problems, 
yet this says more about our fascination with (media) technology than 
about these media’s actual ability to fix those problems effectively and 
in an exclusive way. Nonetheless, online media do also have something to 
offer, not because they are panaceas, but because – provided they are 
used wisely – they can help citizens and civil society organisations 
attain their objectives (to greater effect).

The key question in this report is deceptively simple: How are online 
media used to underpin social engagement? More specifically, how can 
these online media be used to this end in and by civil society? A 
question like this comes dangerously close to the category of questions 
that are so wide-ranging as to be unanswerable. At the very least, 
answering questions of this kind requires an innovative combination of 
methods, of which this study thankfully makes use (for more details see 
the report itself). However, one important aspect that needs to be 
emphasised here is the choice to work with a typology. The development 
of any typology has its drawbacks, because a great many details are 
invariably lost, but the major strength of applying one is that it 
provides an overview of a tremendous diversity, in this instance the 
variety of online practices that foster social engagement. Furthermore, 
the components (or dimensions) of this typology are not just there to 
lend structure to the report, but also constitute an integral part of 
the results of the study. In other words, they did not arise 
arbitrarily, but were generated through the analysis that preceded the 
study.

What the study came up with was a typology comprising two basic 
dimensions. The role of online media in and as used by civil society (to 
promote social engagement) depends first and foremost on a distinction 
between internal, internal-external and external use. The second basic 
dimension is the distinction between access, interaction and participation.

1. The internal use of online media in and among civil society is often 
overlooked in discussions about social engagement, but in this context 
it is extremely important. The argument is this: civil society itself is 
an environment of social engagement and the online media that support 
the work of organisations active in this domain, in so doing, also 
effectively help to foster social engagement. It is here we encounter 
the first set of online practices that enable civil society 
organisations to support their administration, procurement, filing, 
registration, internal communications and internal democratic functioning.
Of course, civil society organisations do not focus exclusively on their 
own actions, and their use of online media, as a function of social 
engagement, is often designed to attain objectives related to specific 
social domains. That said, these civil society organisations’ relations 
with the outside world are complicated, so the typology makes use of two 
components (internal-external and external) to describe and understand 
them. This, too, is a key distinction that was identified in this study, 
because two very different kinds of practices are involved here. In some 
cases civil society organisations aim to draw citizens who find 
themselves outside their scope of activity into the respective 
organisation (in many different ways); on other occasions they try to 
forge links between themselves and the citizens in question. One example 
of this involves the recruitment of volunteers or staff. These kinds of 
practices fall into the category internal-external, as do the 
possibilities given to citizens to offer financial support or offers of 
e-learning by organisations. In other instances, organisations 
strengthen citizens’ engagement without directly involving them in their 
actual workings. In this context, organisations play a role that entails 
giving access to content or technology, stimulating interactions between 
various other individuals, groups or organisations, or facilitating 
these citizens’ participation in social domains other than the 
organisation itself. Practices of this kind fall into the external 
category, and examples include organisations that offer free and/or open 
software and organisations that offer loans to other organisations via 
an online platform or use their own website to collect money for other 
organisations.

2. The second basic dimension to emerge from this study is the 
distinction between access, interaction and participation. This 
distinction, combined with a supporting dimension (differentiation 
between organisations, people, content and typology), has already been 
used in previous publications (see Carpentier, 2011). This dimension 
seems eminently useful in the context of this study for recognising, 
categorising and structuring the current range of practices. Access is 
all about (offering) availability and presence, e.g. providing access to 
information or to people (by making them contactable) or technology 
(e.g. by providing computers). Here we see that online media not only 
enable information to be put to use in what is often a more efficient 
manner (within the organisation), they also make it possible for 
organisations to disseminate information about themselves and their 
staff, provide access to the documents they have produced, and 
(sometimes) place technology at users’ disposal. On the external level 
we see that online media can be used to disseminate information about 
other organisations and unlock information stemming from them. In some 
cases access is provided to technology, for example by organisations in 
the free and/or open software movement (F/LOSS) or in the WiFi community 
movement. The second element of the second basic dimension is 
interaction. Interaction is a concept that denotes what are termed 
socio-communicative relations, where people communicate with each other 
and/or act together (among other things within communities or 
organisations), where people interact with texts (e.g. interpreting 
them), or where people interact with technology. Here again, there are 
many different ways of interacting, which immediately means that online 
media can be used in many different ways. Internally, many forms of 
online cooperation are possible, and online media are also used to study 
and teach or learn. At the internal-external and external levels we see 
a similar structure (admittedly with a different purpose), with five 
forms of interactive use of online media: financing, recruiting, 
teaching or learning, networking and mobilising, complemented with the 
divulgence of specific information (so-called social curation, whereby 
people point to interesting content that they found on other plforms) 
and the teaching of skills in the use of online technologies.
At the internal-external level, we see online media used to receive 
donations, recruit staff and volunteers, assign tasks, study, create a 
community around the organisation, conduct campaigns, allow people to 
interact with content they have produced themselves and with technology. 
Furthermore, (at the external level) online media are used to make 
online donations, to enable cofinancing and joint purchases, stimulate 
volunteer work, support the sharing of know-how, form networks, expand 
social dialogue, enable campaigns to be run and allow people to interact 
with content and technologies.
Finally, there is the third concept of the second basic dimension: 
participation. In the study in question, this concept acquires a 
specific significance because it refers to joint decision-making, both 
formal and informal. In practice this means that the discussion on 
participation ultimately revolves around power and the equality of power 
positions. Once again, online media are used here: in the case of 
internal and internal-external use they serve for participation in the 
organisation, whereby some forms of this participation are more minimal 
and others are more maximal. At the internal level online media are used 
to foster internal (organisational) democracy, for example by providing 
access to (internal) policy documents, or to facilitate it through forms 
of co-decision-making.
At the internal-external level we see that organisations use online 
media to gain advice from outside the organisation, launch a dialogue 
about their organisation, poll their supporters or, in the more radical 
forms, to allow outsiders to take part in decision-making processes. 
Participation also plays a role at the external level, but in such 
scenarios it is more a question of participation via organisations, with 
reference made to the role they play in empowering people in other, 
external contexts (i.e. outside the organisation in question). Often, 
the focus is on emancipating citizens and giving them greater influence 
in the political domain, as for example in the case of a project that 
informs citizens about how taxpayers’ money is spent. However, we see 
that online media are also used to support their participation in a 
cultural and media context and in the domains of knowledge and 
technology, amongst other things.

The following table below affords an overview of the typology developed 
here [removed]

In addition to highlighting the diversity of online practices, this 
study also focussed on their frequency, based on a survey of 902 Belgian 
civil society organisations that provided information on how often 
organisations use which online media and insights into the practices 
used to foster engagement. Here are some of the striking findings about 
organisations’ use of online media: roughly 90% of civil society 
organisations have their own website; virtually all organisations 
(99.4%) use e-mail; 59.2% claim to use social networking sites, 53.1% 
text messages and 41.6% an intranet. So we can conclude that 
conventional online media are widespread within civil society. Other 
technologies are less commonly used, such as online cooperation and 
video sharing 25-35%; Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), photo 
sharing, blogging and micro-blogging 15%-25%; mobile apps, RSS feeds, QR 
codes and video-conferencing 10-15%; whereas chat rooms, magazine 
publishing, social curation, wikis and podcasting all scored less than 
10%. The differences between various types of organisations hinge 
primarily on where the organisations are active geographically, and on 
their sector of activity, with some online media being used more by the 
cultural sector.

When we look at the use of online media in terms of practices that 
promote engagement, we find high percentages at the internal level for 
communication, exchanges of information and networking, but lower 
percentages for the internal use of online media for teaching/learning 
and research, which are used by somewhere between 50 and 60% of the 
surveyed organisations or thereabouts. At the internal-external level we 
find the same strong emphasis on communication, the exchange of 
information and networking, but also high scores (of roughly 80%) for 
the use of online media for persuasive purposes (convincing people). The 
figures for the (interactive) use of online media for teaching/learning, 
recruiting and financing are lower, especially when we consider the 
actual use of various online technologies. In this latter instance the 
percentages are below 20%, and most of the more participative forms of 
online usage also yielded low percentages. Finally, at the external 
level – an aspect covered by relatively few of the questions included in 
the survey – we see low percentages of below 15% for the interactive use 
of online media for financing, networking and participation. The 
exceptions here concern the use of social curation (44%) and helping 
other organisations to develop their website (27.5%). When we consider 
the differences between the organisations, we see that these differences 
are significant mainly with regard to the geographical scope of the 
organisations’ activities, the region to which they belong and their 
intranet use.

The conclusion underscores the relevance of this study for civil 
society. One of the important lessons to be learnt is that the 
importance of online media for organisations should not be 
overestimated, because it constantly needs to be embedded (and made 
meaningful) within the context of the organisations themselves. At the 
same time, the importance of online media must not be underestimated, 
because they offer a great many possibilities, which are effectively 
deployed, as this study shows. This does not mean there are no gaps or 
opportunities to do better. If we start off by considering the first 
basic dimension (internal/internal-external/external), we see that on 
the external side of this dimension there are many opportunities for 
improvement. Yet there are also a number of gaps relating to the second 
basic dimension. At the interactive level we see that the more 
innovative forms of online media use – for financing, recruiting and 
teaching purposes – are limited, and the presumption here is that a 
number of possibilities are being underexploited. The same observation 
applies to the participative dimension, at the internal, 
internal-external and external levels. Stopping short of suggesting that 
all organisations should start to develop maximalist participative 
logics at all levels, it is worth pointing out that here, too, the 
available opportunities are being underexploited. This study, with its 
many examples, offers many possible sources of inspiration and suggests 
that there are many lessons to be learnt from the experiences of other 
organisations at home and abroad. Yet it should be borne in mind that 
organisations always need to integrate online media into their 
activities and objectives and that such media cannot constitute 
comprehensive stand-alone solutions.

At the same time, the study also calls for further support with respect 
to the promotion of expertise; the facilitation of communicative (and 
participative) assessments of civil society organisations; the 
organisation of needs studies for individual organisations (together 
with the establishment of networks) and per sector (combined with 
consultations); better promotion of existing (positive) examples; the 
mainstreaming of (consideration of) the use of (online) media within the 
King Baudouin Foundation; and more generally speaking the further 
reinforcement of a participative culture within civil society.


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