Abstract
Social media (SM) are widely used by nonprofit organizations (NPOs). However, little is known about how they are used for fundraising, especially regarding their benefits/disbenefits, and the optimum strategies for maximizing value from such campaigns. The study presented here aimed to address this gap by collecting, analyzing and synthesizing the results of the corpus of published academic research on this topic. 
 
 Of 194 potentially relevant search results generated from seven international online databases, only 71 (62 studies) fully met the inclusion criteria. Most of these qualifying studies were published in social science journals in the past three years and derived from high-income countries. Our findings indicate that the benefits NPOs can obtain from using SM for fundraising include increased transparency and accountability, operational, involvement and engagement, and improved organizational image (although in respect of the two latter, outcomes can be mixed). The strategies for NPOs' SM use for fundraising focused either on generic management of social media for NPO’s fundraising or on management of some specific SM fundraising campaigns.
Highlights
nonprofit organizations (NPOs) comprise a wide variety of organizations that receive grants or philanthropic donations to provide goods and services to their clients (Chen, 2011), but without the primary goal of making a profit
The not-for-profit sector accounted for circa 5.4% of the USA’s GDP with a contribution of $905.9 billion in 2013 (McKeever, 2015). As their business model is partly dependent on the willingness of people to donate time and money (Kenney, 2012), NPOs make a great deal of effort to reach as many potential donors as possible, and to build or strengthen relationships with them (Waters, Burnett, Lamm, & Lucas, 2009)
Out of 194 results returned by our search strategy, 184 titles and abstracts remained after the removal of 10 duplicates
Summary
NPOs comprise a wide variety of organizations that receive grants or philanthropic donations to provide goods and services to their clients (Chen, 2011), but without the primary goal of making a profit. The not-for-profit sector accounted for circa 5.4% of the USA’s GDP with a contribution of $905.9 billion in 2013 (McKeever, 2015) As their business model is partly dependent on the willingness of people to donate time and money (Kenney, 2012), NPOs make a great deal of effort to reach as many potential donors as possible, and to build or strengthen relationships with them (Waters, Burnett, Lamm, & Lucas, 2009). Fundraising via SM is one of the most rapidly growing ways NPOs use to receive funds from individuals. 71% of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in 2017 reported that they found SM beneficial for online fundraising (Global NGO Online Technology Report, 2017)
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