Beyond proxy: principles of NGO accounts of performance on social media
研究了非政府组织在社交媒体上如何说明绩效，通过分析瑞典红十字会2021年Facebook帖子与年报对比，揭示了五个关键原则，挑战了传统绩效说明方式。
In response to heightened accountability pressures, NGOs increasingly use social media to account for their performance, yet little is known about the characteristics of these accounts. Given social media’s unique characteristics as a forum for accountability, such as rapidness, multimodality, and multivocality, they could reshape how performance is accounted for compared to conventional fora such as annual reports. Our purpose is to explore the key principles underpinning NGOs’ accounts of performance on social media. By applying classical rhetoric (ethos, pathos, and logos) and visual semiotics as a conceptual framework, we conducted a close reading of the Swedish Red Cross’s accounts of performance on Facebook in 2021 (77 posts in total) and compared them with the 2021 annual report. The analysis reveals five principles that distinguish accounts of performance on social media from conventional accounting: extended narratorship, individualisation, temporal proximity, visual modality, and serialisation. Together, these principles reflect accounting through lived experience rather than by proxy, which challenges the norms of framing performance in both accounting in general and from an NGO accountability perspective.