doxa.comunicación | 26, pp. 13-34 | 15

January-June 2018

Digital communication of Spanish NGOs in support of Western Sahara Laura de Cos Carrera and Luis Mañas Viniegra

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

(Arroyo Almaraz, 2012: 1, Balas Lara, 2008: 17), and must consider it to be a transversal element capable of raising aware-ness, generating trust, and creating on their part a reputation as agents of social change (Martín Nieto, 2007: 132, Balas Lara, 2008: 32).

“Communication is an essential part of these organizations because it is linked to their own reason for existence. Thus, as an example, while companies communicate to exist and sell more, non-profit entities exist to communicate for the purpose of creating a better society” (Vidal and Creixams, 2006: 1).

Indeed, NGOs find their reason for being in the transmission of certain values to society, which contribute to making it more democratic, liveable and humane, but “the challenge is to do it with greater professionalism, creativity and efficiency” (Vidal Climent, 2004: 322), despite the fact that communication management is still one of its main shortcomings (Herranz de la Casa, 2010: 108). This situation is particularly worrisome in NGOs with fewer resources and greater difficulties in mak-ing themselves known, appearing in the media, and standing out:

“We lack an adequate social communication strategy. We have little capacity to transmit very important problems to society. People don’t know us, or don’t know much about us. Many times, we don’t manage to capture their interest. [...] Social communication is a pending issue in most associations” (Fundación Esplai, 2002: 20).

Despite these social goals, the instrumental and media vision with regard to communication that many of these organiza-tions have is paradoxical, being oriented toward the search for funding (Bernabé, 2001: 145; Balas Lara, 2011: 197). In this scenario, a greater use of new technologies would encourage a change in their communication toward the creation of better content and a greater awareness and participation by the public (Arroyo Almaraz and Martín Nieto, 2011: 46, Arroyo Almaraz, Baladrón Pazos and Martín Nieto, 2013: 85), by taking advantage of a greater diffusion based on direct communication in a flexible way and without high costs (Martín Nieto, 2007: 135, Herranz de la Casa, 2010: 204). Using digital tools would enable communication to be more effective, transparent, participatory, plural, inclusive, and horizontal (Montoliu y Riu, 2012: 11).

Virtually all NGOs currently use a website to introduce themselves, publicize their work, and increase their visibility, but few take advantage of interactivity, immediacy and the new ways of participation offered by the Internet (Arroyo Almaraz and Martín Nieto, 2011: 250, Un Sol Món Foundation, 2002: 22). In this sense, the use of social networks as an instrument of communication for NGOs responds to the needs of this type of organization to use “low-cost digital technologies (webs, social networks, blogs, etc.) that facilitate information tasks, participation or network organization” (Cárcar Benito, 2015: 136, Lema Blanco, Rodríguez Gómez and Barranquero Carretero, 2016: 92), with the aim of obtaining adequate dissemina-tion (Couldry, 2010). In this way, groups as diverse as partners, patrons, volunteers and the media themselves find in the online communication of NGOs a space in which to inform themselves, interact and integrate a solidarity project in which they participate (Soria Ibáñez, 2011: 177).

However, these objectives are difficult to attain if the digital communication of NGOs lacks authentic interactivity (Soria Ibáñez, 2011: 184) to facilitate citizen participation and bi-directional information, essential characteristics of the web 2.0 (O’ Reilly, 2005).

To be precise, the maximum expression of this bi-directionality oriented toward social change can be reached by NGOs through social networks, as “they favour the ideas made freely by users, and with these, virality and personal engagement