Determinants and Challenges of NGO Social Media Communication: Explaining Tensions Around “Looking Cool” for Social Change

Public communications of development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have long been criticized concerning their depoliticized nature, not least in the social media space. Drawing on discussions of the “politics of development” and interviews with NGO social media managers, this study identifies three thematic factors that contribute to this trend. First, the pursuit of social media “engagement insights” incentivizes crafting concise, spreadable messages to northern audiences, further decontextualizing the complexities of development and silencing local voices. Second, the need to protect institutional reputations discourages NGOs from engaging in more critically oriented and dialogic public interaction. Third, NGOs struggle with intraorganizational incongruencies, which further complicate the potential for repoliticizing development communication in the digital space. The study builds toward an argument of “looking cool,” a persistent tendency in NGO communication driven by the ethos of the attention economy, where crafting evermore compelling, yet appropriately appealing content suitable to the social media logic caters to the northern gaze, which raises significant concerns about the repoliticization of humanitarian and development communication online.