Exploring Donor Influence and Public Engagement: Computational and Thematic Analyses of Social Media Messages

How might donor influence shape the ways community foundations engage with public constituents? Using donor-advised funds to proxy for donor influence, I combined content analysis and structural topic modeling to analyze the themes of 4,055 public engagement messages sent by community foundations on Twitter. The structural topic model results revealed that donor influence significantly varied the themes of public engagement tweets. Strong donor influence was significantly correlated with greater use of policy advocacy and public education messages but negatively correlated with public mobilization and dialogic messages. This study contributes to a growing line of research on donor control and provides important insights into the power dynamics among the triad of community constituents, donors, and foundations.