Generative nonprofits will co-create services using social media platforms

While previous research explores the use of social media in nonprofits, the key emerging event(s) (or outcome) and mechanisms capable of producing these events remain insufficiently explained. We observe that the growing use of social media in nonprofits is intended to attract public involvement, participation, and engagement in the provision of nonprofit services. This paper, therefore, identifies co-creation of nonprofit services as a key event in nonprofit use of social media, and the structure of social media in nonprofits (i.e., affordances, symbolic expressions, and privacy preferences) offers the mechanisms producing this event. Social media supports organization-public relationships (OPR) in nonprofits as a key mechanism; however, such relationships remain unexplored. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory, we propose organizational generativity as a promising capability for the actualization of social media structure, OPR to realize service co-creation. This paper argues, hypothetically, that organization generativity is positively related to the structure of social media in nonprofits, OPR, and service co-creation as an overall outcome