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- Creators: School of Life Sciences
This thesis project utilizes a multi-frame analysis from Bolman and Deal’s Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice and Leadership to reinvent a fundraising opportunity for a nonprofit organization named Save the Cats Arizona. This thesis begins with what makes Save the Cats Arizona stand out from other organizations. From there, a breakdown of the organization’s structure is provided. Next, research is provided on the impacts of fundraising on social media platforms and online engagement across nonprofit organizations. Additional research is provided to highlight the importance of social media management in nonprofit organizations. Save the Cats Arizona is then analyzed through Bolman and Deal’s multi-frame theory – which includes the structural, human-resource, political, and symbolic frame. Finally, the knowledge gained from the multi-frame analysis is implemented into ideas on how to improve fundraising opportunities for Save the Cats Arizona. This project ends with a reflection about this thesis and Save the Cats Arizona’s future.
Social media is a tool widely used by many organizations for purposes of spreading ideas, influencing users politically, and promoting products for purchase. Among the ideas spread on social media is religious belief, a task undertaken by religious officials and members alike, in both widespread and personal communication. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has promoted its religion online for years through official webpages and the testimonies of members, but now seeks to spread knowledge of its beliefs and increase membership by involving its full-time missionaries on Facebook and Instagram. The initiative to add online-proselytizing to a missionary’s list of duties began in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been through multiple changes to arrive at the present function of social media in full-time missionary work. Despite these positive changes, missionaries still feel that they lack the necessary knowledge and skills to conduct productive conversations online that lead to opportunities to share their message. Two separate missions are analyzed through Bolman & Deal’s Four Frames to gain a complete perspective of missionary work through social media and how it can be improved. By implementing visual symbols that relate to the importance of social media missionary work and increasing the social media training that missionaries receive, they would feel better prepared to host conversations on online platforms and share their messages. Additionally, by updating the leadership position associated with social media in a mission, more missionaries would ultimately gain expertise in this skill and better fulfill their purpose as missionaries.
To conduct research, we developed a survey that was distributed and taken by students at Arizona State University. The goal of surveying college students was to understand how young people who regularly use social media are persuaded by micro-influencers. To gain more insight, we interviewed three local micro-influencers that we discovered through Instagram and research. The goal of these interviews was to discover tactics that micro-influencers use when posting to market sponsored products. Additionally, we hoped to uncover a pattern that micro-influencers use when building their social media following. Ultimately, we developed a six-step guide from our research that aspiring micro-influencers can follow to strategize their rise as a social media micro-influencer. We also discuss the social media app TikTok, which we believe will be heavily used by influencers and micro-influencers in the future.
Online dating apps are prevalent within dating culture, but they are also forms of social media. Although the way in which people use these apps might be more targeted than other forms of social media, it seems likely that the problems associated with social media could very well apply to dating apps too. However, this is an empirical question that begs a scientific and systematic investigation. Dating apps have a number of unique dynamics, such as being centered around romantic relationships with the users on the service and judging & being judged by others. Self-objectification, a form of extreme public self-awareness, has been tied to both social media usage and more recently to dating app usage. Prior research examining self-objectification within and between dating app users has been inconclusive; it is not clear whether more frequent dating app usage predicts self-objectification or not. The current study aimed to clarify the relationship between dating app usage and self-objectification. Data were collected from 174 college students who were active dating app users. They were polled on their frequency of dating app usage and given a self-administered self-objectification inventory online. Findings show that self-objectification differs significantly across dating app usage groups. Additionally, a moderation effect of race was found. For white participants, the more frequently they used data app, the more self-objectification they reported. For non-white participants, there was a nonlinear relationship between data app usage and self-objectification. Among non-white dating app users, low and high dating app usage groups reported higher self-objectification than the moderate dating app usage group. Limitations and implications of the study are discussed to hopefully offer insights into the relationships between dating app usage and self-objectification.
Students from Student Health Outreach for Wellness (SHOW) partnered with Justa Center in Downtown Phoenix, Arizona to interview 10 elders (age 55+) experiencing homelessness. The approach used was narrative medicine with purposes of 1) demonstrate empathy and awareness for the needs of individuals experiencing homelessness, 2) decrease negative stigmatization surrounding these individuals, and 3) use narrative medicine to promote healing of their traumas. The project's results include 30 social media posts for Instagram and Facebook and an approximately 50 minute film featuring all 10 interviews.