Evaluation of Social Media Impact on UN Agencies in Yemen

Nowadays, the whole world is becoming a small village. Globalization is the fact of living everywhere. The use of the internet and advanced technology integrates with all different life angles and can never be neglected in our daily lives. As part of this technology advancement, social media has broken into our daily lives and you can find these platforms or at least one of them in every home. Social media is now part of any business everywhere, and all businesses now think of it as the first marketing option for all kind of services provided. Starting from the fact that social media is a critical tool for any business, this study analyzes how social media can affect the work of non-profit organizations. The study targets UN agencies in Yemen. To assess and evaluate this impact of social media on UN agencies in Yemen, a questionnaire of 25 questions was constructed and circulated among different people in these agencies. As in the case of other previous studies, the results of this study show that there is a great positive impact of social media on brand awareness, community engagement and organizations performance. Similar to other studies, fundraising is used as purpose of social media use, but it still needs more strategic plans in the future to be applied efficiently. UN agencies have to keep on more strategic plans to keep their social media platforms into their own targets.


Introduction
As a non-developed country (one of the third world countries), Yemen wasn't expected to flourish in terms of advanced technology. Still, social media in Yemen is now the basic mean for almost all business, which became a mean for marketing like all countries around the world. Because of social media's wide acceptance and its sufficient impact on any kind of business globally, it became the first approach when it comes to marketing or branding, as businesses always seek the best use of its advantage (Durkin, McGowan, & McKeown, 2013). Now, almost all non-profit organizations globally follow the same approach including the organizations in Yemen.
In the past, marketing used the traditional means like magazines, newspaper, radio, and paper distribution (brochures and leaflet) However, all businesses now are converting to the use of social media to reach their targeted customers or entities with their ideas, products and general thoughts (Logan, Bright, & Gangadharbatla, 2012). The huge behavior changes of consumers pushed organizations mangers to have a new method of following online platforms (Tiago & Verissimo, 2014).
If you compare these organizations in the past, you would not find a division called "Communication" like what we have now. Moreover, the effectiveness proved by social media is considered cheap comparing to the old means. The impact of social media in terms of the word of mouth generated by social media and the cost of effectiveness of social media platforms (Facebook and Twitter) make it an alternative to the old-style advertising (Zhang, Johnston, & Shao, 2014).
Although it's believed in Yemen, like in all other places in the world, that social media has a massive impact either in terms of cost or final results, it's still difficult to fully depend only on social media. There are still many rural areas, where people have almost no access to internet or have not heard of social media in their entire lives. For that, all non-profit organizations still use other old school means for some of their marketing and branding, while keeping social media as their king force mean. This study aims at examining how social media serves UN agencies in order to serve the communities, assessing how social media can influence the organization's performance, and examining the role of social media in fundraising.
Moreover, Dighe (2002), Gupta et al. (2013) and Govette (2014) argued that there are many benefits of social media platforms for non-profit organizations, which could be categorized into two main benefits: nonfinancial and financial benefits. Getting global attention by huge audience and sharing information can frame the core of the nonfinancial benefits (Kanter & Paine, 2012). Moreover, another nonfinancial benefit of social media platforms is that they offer a tool for consistent feedback (Kanter & Paine, 2012;Foster, 2014;Khan, Hoffman, & Misztur, 2014).

Branding Awareness in Social Media Context
The use of social media that allows people to share, react, and create content within platforms allows organizations even those with a low budget to reach more audience and talk about the organizations. Social media is the tool that creates a name and a brand for the origination which leads to the impact of donor. The American Marketing Association (2014) defined brand as a name, a term, a design, a sign, or a symbol or just a mix of all these words to distinguish a good service provided to their audience among all other competitors. From marketing perspective, awareness means how famous a brand is and how well-known a product or service is. Therefore, brand awareness indicates that a brand is distinguished by a specific customer and related to a specific product or service. Top-of-Mind awareness is considered the highest level of brand awareness (Aaker, 1991). This level of awareness is accomplished whenever the brand is remembered as first name when measured by the unaided recall test (Jeffery, 2010). According to Van Haaften (2017), top-of-mind awareness is already dominating the person's mind when thinking of the product or service.

Community Engagement
The social media platforms started a new way for organizations to build community engagement and create a relationship with their stakeholders (Briones et al., 2011). Social media does not only create current community engagement, but it also builds potential engagement with the stakeholders, audience, and even donors through open sharing information channels in real time (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Through social media, you can find the most cost-effective platforms to communicate, start a dialogue and mobilize activators in best time manner (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
There are different definitions of community engagement, which reflect it in many ways but still have things in common. According to Hollebeek (2011), customer engagement means that the consumer interacts, builds dialogues and saves a value with the organization through making personal experiences. However, Vivek, Beatty and Morgan (2012) defined community engagement as the level of intensity of one's connectivity and participation with the organization's activities, which are initiated by either the consumer or the organization.
Organizations use social media platforms as a marketing tool to promote their services or even products and build visibility through these platforms on the internet (Salem & Salem, 2019). It is true that almost all companies and organizations fully understand the importance of these online platforms to reach their audience and customers (Salem & Salem, 2019). However, they are also aware of the difficulties they face to keep their recognition, loyalty, and brand awareness (engagement) (Ismail, 2017). The organizations' point of view of social media is to use it to conduct effective advertisement campaign and covert the users to be a part of these campaigns. In addition, they involve those users into the development of their services by creating a platform for them, which they can share their own ideas and build engagement (Becker et al., 2013). Now, social media marketing (SMM) is considered the most effective marketing tool that builds strong relationship with customers. Therefore, strengthening the purchasing and engaging with brands are the most important goals to be achieved for marketing communication (Kim & Ko, 2012). Though it is often intertwined with customer experience (CX) and customer relationship management (CRM), customer engagement (CE) is defined by Paul Greenberg as "the continuous interaction among customers and company, offered by the company and chosen by the customer" (Sashi, 2012). According to Kumar (2013), companies in general are changing from product-sales philosophy into customer engagement philosophy.

Organization performance
Organization performance is defined as the way the organization creates a balance between the cost of its financial goals and marketing criteria (Li, Ragu-Nathan, Ragu-Nathan, & Subba Rao, 2006). Another definition of organization performance is the output of many factors like job process, teamwork, relations and communication, leadership, job atmosphere that creates innovation, policy, loyalty, creativity, culture, and image. According to Chen and Paulraj (2004), organization performance converts input to output to accomplish specific outcomes. According to his definition, performance tells about the relationship between minimal and effective cost (economy), between considerable output (efficiency) and effective cost, and between output and accomplished outcome (effectiveness). Moreover, organization performance has a different definition, which says that there are three angles shaping performance (outcome), namely financial performance (income, returns on assets, and return on investment), product market performance (sales and market share), and shareholder return (total shareholder return and economic value added).
Because changes are something consistent, organizations must adapt to changes and act accordingly to get individuals deal with faced challenges regularly. Customers always expect quick responses to their frequent changing needs and requirements. Rapid adaption surfaces the adjustments and the modifications, which are made by the organization and its component to respond to these changes according to the requirement of customers and the internal and external environment change (Cameron, 1984). These days, organizations must develop their learning skills to become more flexible to respond to consumers' requirements, and that is why they are keen to have employees with effective skills to do so (Dubois & Rothwell, 2004). According to Byham and Moyer (1996), organizations are supposed to hire employees who are capable to deal with such internal and external challenges in the surrounded environment, which will allow the organizations to predict these changes and act with prompt response in regular matters accordingly.
It has been a rule that originations work on spending less time when marketing new idea, product or a service from competitive advantage perspective. The time of market is the time consumed from the moment the product or service is initiated as an idea until it is initiated in the market (Lines, 2015). Moreover, time of market for a new project or service is defined as the competitive advantage source (Afonso, Nunes, Paisana, & Braga, 2008).
Cost reduction is the achievement of real reduction of the unit cost of the product or the service that has been reduced without any effect of the proper use of this product or service intentionally. It is very important not to mix the concept of reducing the cost with saving or controlling the cost, as saving cost could be a temporary action that can affect the quality of the product or the service provided. Still, reducing cost should be a real reduction of cost while keeping the very high standard of the product or the service (Barbole, Nalwade, & Parakh, 2013).
Innovation was defined as a collective phenomenal effort by a group of people interacting with others and not by individuals. Such efforts are gathered to effectively integrate a new idea development and a new market development (Myers & Marquis, 2005). Moreover, innovation has a firm connection with organizational learning, which is the organization ability to create, admit, get a new idea into action, and process the project or the service (Calantonea, Cavusgil, & Zhao, 2002). In addition, innovation is also known as a way of developing a fresh idea or an innovation and introducing it into the market as project or service (Thornhill, 2006). Innovation depends on The importance of social media use is that innovation is encouraged through the consistent observation of customers' feedback, perspectives and interactions (Matuszak, 2007;Tapscott & Williams, 2006). It was stated that innovation plays a major role in the development of the projects in the industry through the introduction of a new product or service (Chaston & Mangles, 1997).

Fundraising
Getting the attention of charitable donations through individuals or cooperation for social program is a critical step in the strategic plan for any organization for many reasons. Organizations do not have these platforms to reflect the real suffering of the communities they serve. They will never gain support and trust which may threat their existence. Now, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are used to connect with donors using all the features in these platforms ("How nonprofits can use social media", 2020). Beside the revenue increment, it plays a major role in raising the awareness of the community of the organization purpose and mission. Soliciting donations through individuals and cooperation enables a financial network, which could be accessed by nonprofits annually and can result in the expansion of the programs of organization's mission. On the other hand, the world has noticed a huge increase in the number of organizations, and the competition is getting intense for the donor dollar. It is important to mention that the market of donation is not stable due to many facts such as the unstable world economy, politics, and tax. Therefore, the charity society including nonprofit organizations must think creatively of different methods for donor consistency (Froelich, 1999).
Organizations are searching for an alternative tool that combines finance efficiency and fundraising effectiveness. Technology will play the first and the most important role for donor collection, as all people are now connected virtually (Wasley, 2009). Using social media tools for fund increment enables organizations to capitalize on social media network effect and impulse donors (Saxton, 2013). Now, there are very quick applications used through media, which allow individual donors to donate directly to the organization (Saxton, 2013).
According to different studies, around 21% increment of fundraising occurred through just a click on social media. Social media users are motivated to donate especially when they are motivated about the activity of organizations on social media platforms. Donors see that social media platforms are quick, safe and effective channels to donate (McCall, 2019). According to a study conducted in 2010, around 200 charities use a minimum of one platform of social media to come up with donations, and all these charities leaders confessed in interviews about the importance of social media in this regard (Barnes, 2011). According to a study, most prominent of 200 nonprofit organizations are seeking a minimum of one of their social media platforms to make and execute donations (Barnes & Mattson, 2008).
Although fundraising through social media is still new, raising fund through the use of the internet is not new. It was stated that many of the big charities started gathering fund through the internet in the late 1990s. Still, the advocacy of using the social media and the internet is still in progress as a critical sector for giving (Waters, 2007). One example of this is The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 2011, which started with a list of 9 charities in 2011 and indicated that the use of social media increased by 10 percent after the online fundraising. ARC (The American Red Cross) managed to increase around 19% of its fund, which is around 188 million US dollar through online donation (Indiana University, 2011).
Since the beginning of nonprofit organizations in the United States, the funds process has started to be a debated subject. Through the last decade, fundraising has witnessed a massive change. For that, all non-profit organizations should get ready to adapt these changes in order to survive in the increasing competitive market. Beside the change in the economy, we are in a fresh era of change in technology and communication, which affect the way organizations' network deals with donors, volunteers, members of board and other organizations. Nowadays, the whole society fully depends on social media and networking, and social media has dramatically influenced the way non-organizations raise awareness of their causes. Contacting donors via discussions or email solicitation don't happen anymore because the majority of such fundraising approaches happen through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. For instance, a new research found that around 75 percent of 980 organizations are using the Facebook platform, which has over 220 million of users around the world (Wasley, 2009). In addition, Facebook cause, which is the most well-known social networking application used by nonprofit organizations, has over 24 million of active users on monthly basis, who are allowed to get their friends into the cause, keep all people connected into the cause, and most importantly advocate money into the cause.
Many researchers have discussed the use of social media for all kinds of businesses, and identified famous platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and You-Tube (Berman, Abraham, Battino, Shipnuck, & Neus, 2007). Social media creates many chances for business mainly in mass communication with their targeted audience (Vorvoreanu, Boisvenue, Portela, & Bao, 2013).
The study targets a represented group of communication people, operation and programs leaders in a number of resident UN agencies in Yemen. As it is difficult to get a fixed total number of the targeted population, there is usually a minimum of 2 communication people in each agency and somehow a big number of operations and programs leaders. The sampling is usually gathered from those who can comfortably provide the information, which is called convenience sampling. It is usually difficult and costly to reach the sampling at the exact time of data collection, so the convenience sampling is selected. Therefore, more sampling gives best accurate results (Sekaran & Bougie, 2016). The sample that is between 30-500 is considered a suitable sample for a study (Roscoe, 1975). This study targets 110 respondents.
The survey is divided into four parts and five-points Likert scale was used to measure the attitudes and opinions of the respondents. The first part is to assess the level of brand awareness the UN employees believe social media can create. Six questions were adopted from the study done by Mridha (2016). The second part is to evaluate the level of community engagement the UN employees believe they can get through the activities of social media. This part needs to measure how employees in different departments within the organization think of linking their actual work to social media to come up with a great level of community engagement. Five questions were adopted from two studies done by Vanga, Yang and Andersson (2019) and Cuillierier (2016). The third part of the survey assesses the impact of social media on organization performance. Six questions were adopted from the study done by Dodokh (2017). The last part of the questionnaire studies the effect of social media on organization fundraising. Three questions are adopted to assess the availability of strategic plans to raise fundraising and whether social media tools can be part of these tools (Laird, 2010). The overall reliability is achieved (Cronbach alpha =0.776) and the validity of the instrument was measured using correlation analysis which shows a statistically significant correlation between the overall average of the study constructs and its items, indicating that the construct explains adequate variance in its items and thus has good validity to measure what is it supposed to measure.

Finding
The total survey collected was 110. Almost half of the respondents are females (48.2%), and 51.8% of them are males. Moreover, 34.5% of the respondents stated they have been working for 1-2 years at the UN; 30.9% for 3-4 years; 10% for 5-6 years; and 24.5% have been working for over 6 years at the UN. Out of 110 respondents, 25.5% responded that they work in communication; 26.4% of them work in operations; 33.6% in programs; and 14.5% in other departments, 6.3% of them stated they work in cluster; 12.5% in HR; 6.3% in IT; 6.3% in monitoring and evaluation; 18.8% in procurement; 12.5% in program support; 6.3% in project support unit; 6.3% in projects; 6.3% in project management; 6.3% in protection; and 12.5% in supply and logistics.
Out of 110 respondents, 45.5% always use social media in their regular day; 3.6% of them hardly ever use it; 1.8% of them never use it; 28.2% often use social media in their regular day; 20.9% sometimes use social media. Table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of the brand awareness dimension. As seen in the table, item 4 (You can recognize more logos of different UN agencies through social media platforms.) is ranked the highest in the level of agreement among the respondents of the study (Mean =3.99; SD=0.70). On the other hand, item 6 (The UN agencies keep you informed on issues relevant to their mission and vision through social media.) is ranked the lowest in the level of agreement (Mean =3.66; SD=0.84) with 73.2% rate of agreement. The overall statistics of the brand awareness dimension shows that there is high agreement (Mean =3.82; SD=0.50) with 76.3% rate of agreement. In addition, one sample T test was conducted. The level of brand awareness is high (Mean>=3.4; t=8.781; p<0.05), indicating that the targeted audience are highly aware of the role of social media in raising organizations' brands. The results shows that there are no statistically significant differences in the responses of the study sample regarding the impact of brand awareness according to the department they work in (F =2.500; p>0.05), indicating that their responses are similar to some extent. However, the mean of the communication department is the highest (M=4.0238), whereas the mean of the programs department is the lowest (M=3.6982).
The results shows that 47.3% responded that they do not interact with organization brands on social medial, whereas 52.7% of them responded that they interact with organization brands on social media. 4.4% of the study sample responded that they extremely often interact with organization/ company brands on social media platforms, 17.3% of them stated that they never do that, 23.6% of them stated they do not do that so often, and 24.5% of them do that very often. Out of 110 respondents, 8.2% of the respondents stated that they interact with organization brands on social media by commenting on the post; 26.4% of them stated that they do not interact at all; 46.4% stated they do that by liking the post and the tweet; and 19.1% of them stated they do that by sharing the post and the tweet.
As shown in Table 3, the results indicate that there is no significant association between the working years at the UN in Yemen and the belief of respondents in the engagement of social media (x2=2.843, p>0.05). Thus, there are no significant differences in their responses. However, 5-6 years are the highest (63.6%), and 1-2 years are the lowest (42.1%).  Table 4 shows the descriptive statistics of the organization performance dimension. As seen in the Table, item 2 (Organizations should always keep looking for new innovative ways to deliver their services to the community they serve) is ranked the highest in the level of agreement (Mean=4.57; SD=0.53) with 91.4% rate of agreement.
On the other hand, item 1 (Do organizations have the ability to adapt to internal and external changes to keep their competitive advantage through social media) is ranked the lowest in level of agreement (Mean =3.67; SD= 0.76) with 73.4% rate of agreement. The overall statistics of the organization performance dimension indicates that the level of agreement is high (Mean =4.11; SD=0.43) with 82.2% rate of agreement. The results reveal that there is a significant difference in the responses of the study sample regarding the impact of organization performance according to their department (F=3.987; p<0.05), indicating that their responses are not the same. To highlight the differences, post hoc test (LSD) for multiple comparisons was conducted. As seen in Table 5, the staistically signficant differences regarding the impact of the orgnization performance are in favor of those working in communication department over those working in operations, programs, and other depratments (p<0.05). This indciates that the level of agreement of those working in communication is significantly different from those working in other departments in that they believe organizatipon performance has an impact on organization performance. As for the fundraising, the results reveal that 15.5% of the respondents responded that their organizations do not have a strategic plan for social media, whereas 84.5% of them responded that their organizations have a strategic plan for social media. Out of the 110 respondents, 29.1% of the respondents stated that their originations' strategic plan does not include a fundraising strategy, whereas 70.9% of them stated that their originations' strategic plan includes that.
Chi Square of independence was used to examine the association between department and the impact of social media on fundraising. As shown in Table 6, the results shows that there is no significant association between the department and the responses of the sample regarding the impact of the social medial on fundraising (x2=1.070, p>0.05). Therefore, there are no significant differences in their responses. However, those working in programs department rank the highest (62.2%), and those working in operations rank the lowest (51.7%).

Discussion and Conclusion
The study indicates a high level of social media impact on brand awareness, community engagement, and organization performance at the UN agencies in Yemen. The study proved that the impact of social media is high rather than just a platform for fun. Social media is proved to create brand awareness among almost all people who use social media.
The majority of the respondents believe that social media platforms create brand awareness of the organization, which can tell about its activities, mission and vision. Mridha (2016), also, indicated that there are very important positive relationships between brand awareness of the nonprofit organizations' activities, mission, vision, etc and the usage of social media. This study focuses only on Facebook and Twitter as the two main social media platforms, whereas the study by Mridha (2016) studied all the social media platforms.
It was not as expected that there will be a difference in the responses regarding the number of working years. The researchers assumes that people who have been working longer would have had stronger interaction and higher level of engagement through social media platforms. However, the majority of the respondents regardless of their number of working years believe that community engagement can be created through social media platforms. It is similar to the study by Vanga et al. (2019), which indicated that 80% of the respondents interact and follow brands of organizations through social media platforms. It is also in line with the second research by Cuillierier (2016), which indicated that 79% of the respondents believe in the community engagement through social media platforms and mainly through Facebook platform. This study indicating that the targeted audience can feel the tangible result of the social media impact on the different elements of performance.
The study proves that employees who work at the communication department strongly believe the performance of the organization can significantly get affected by social media platforms. This is not difficult to be proved as people in communication can see such impact by their own eyes. The level of the cost reduction communication can grant to the organization instead of using the old style of marketing is something that was proved in this study, which has similar results to the study by Dodokh (2017).
It was noticed that people in the programs come after the communication people. People working in programs have a better understanding of the relation of performance to the social media platforms than their operation colleagues because they are more in the field. The work they perform in the field and their understanding of social media platforms are attributed to the use of more innovative ideas to reach more people virtually.
Overall, the study proves that social media platforms have significant impact on the performance of organizations in many different aspects, which is exactly in line of agreement with the study by Dodokh (2017).
The study also indicates that there is no difference in the responses regarding the impact of social media on fundraising. However, the people working in the programs see that their work on social media platforms can significantly attract more fundraising in the future. This is in line with the study by Laird (2010). His study and this study see that better strategic planning in the area can affect positively the level of fundraising increment by better exploiting of social media platforms.

Recommendations
Based on the results of this study, the following recommendations should be considered by the UN agencies in Yemen: • UN organizations and even all non-profit organizations in Yemen should keep and maintain the effective tools of social media platforms for many reasons. • Organizations should raise full awareness of social media impact on the organizations among their inside people. Regardless of their ages, gender, number of working years, and most importantly the departments they work in, employees should have equal understanding of the impact of social media on the organizations. By raising this level of awareness by the organization itself among its own people, the major significant differences between the respondents will get less. • The study indicates the great impact of social media platforms on the level of brand awareness and community engagement of the organization. UN agencies should work on maintaining this level and enhancing the idea widely. Therefore, other organizations in the country can work on achieving these two goals through the use of social media platforms. • UN agencies in Yemen should work on their social media platforms to achieve tangible results for the organizations performance, as it is a critical objective for the use of social media platforms. • UN agencies or even other nonprofit organizations in Yemen should have more strategic plans to raise fundraising through social media. Yemen is one of the most vulnerable countries, which needs consistent and huge fundraising to meet the need of the population. Social media platforms are effective tools to achieve this.

Future Research
This study focuses on the UN agencies in Yemen, and the targeted responses were taken mainly from the staff of these agencies. Future researches can study INGOs and even local organizations in the country. Moreover, even the targeted sample can be expanded to reach more people from the other side. Therefore, it could study the impact on the use of social media for beneficiaries. Since this study focuses only on the impact of social media on brand awareness, community engagement, performance and fundraising of the organizations, other studies can have different angles in their research. Therefore, the focus will be on how to apply these results through social media.