Building community resilience and calling for collective actions: how corporations and publics communicate disaster aid on social media

Understanding how corporations communicate their disaster aid efforts, an emerging form of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and how publics respond provides insight into how public relations can better serve communities’ needs. Guided by fully functioning society theory, this study examines corporations’ disaster aid messages and the Chinese publics’ responses to these messages on Weibo. The computational analysis of 761 disaster aid posts and 51,124 comments reveals that corporations contribute to community resilience through messages emphasising shared responsibility and collective action. These messages resonate with and garner active public support, ultimately fostering communitas and shared narratives essential for disaster recovery. This study validates and extends fully functioning society theory by (1) computationally confirming its core premises in non-Western contexts, (2) revealing how CSR, particularly social media disaster aid communication, serves as a vital pathway for organisations to contribute to a fully functioning society, and (3) identifying unique Chinese cultural-political factors influencing collaborative resilience building. Moreover, this study computationally analysed large-scale social media comments to move beyond traditional engagement metrics, revealing complex public responses that included active support and alignment with corporate narratives and significant divergence and unrelated critiques.