Activating beyond Informing: Action-Oriented Utilization of WeChat by Chinese Environmental NGOs

Social media has generated new opportunities for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to inform and educate publics, and more powerfully, it enables NGOs to mobilize people to act. To enhance understanding how social media functions to serve action-oriented communication for organizations, we focused on WeChat, the largest social media in China. We examined an original dataset of 2472 articles posted by 175 environmental NGOs (ENGOs) during a two-month period in 2019 on WeChat. A qualitative content analysis was conducted to identify what actions ENGOs use WeChat to mobilize. We used statistical methods to analyze the effectiveness of ENGOs’ action-oriented utilization of WeChat and the organizational differences in the adoption of action-oriented messages. This study reveals that more than a quarter of the articles were mobilizational in nature. There were three major types of action ENGOs mobilize via WeChat. Though the informational use of WeChat is extensive, users prefer action-oriented messages and the activating strategy is more effective in motivating users to engage. Our analysis indicates that the more participatory people feel, the more likely they are to respond to WeChat messages, and the more they are involved. Our findings have implications for how the adoption of WeChat helps engender new paradigms of citizen participation.