The beginning of the 21st century brought a change in the approach to public relations (PR). Both the literature and the practice saw a shift in focus from evaluating the efficiency of communication strategies to relationship management. On the other hand, the growing interest in the use of social media in the management of many types of organizations has prompted researchers to seek the theoretical causes of this trend. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine the scope of the Polish public benefit organizations’ (PBO) use of the social network Facebook in managing relationships with stakeholders. The PBO is a specific form of non-profit organization, which enjoys the special privilege of collecting tax-deductible donations of 1% of personal income tax (PIT). The research covered 876 entities, which were divided into four clusters depending on their size. A database of posts was created that the organizations published in the period selected for the research. Then, the impact of the Facebook content on user engagement was analyzed. For this purpose, various statistical methods were used, i.e. descriptive statistics, statistical tests and multiple regression analysis. The results indicate that, in spite of social media’s unquestionable advantages, public benefit organizations only take advantage of a small proportion of this potential. The role of the most popular service, Facebook, in increasing organizational revenue from 1% of PIT deductions seems secondary at best. Apart from that, the results showed that the rates of posting by different Polish public benefit organizations vary widely. Although some organizations were very active in this aspect, the Facebook pages of many organizations remained completely inactive throughout the analysis or showed only minimal activity. Larger organizations exhibited a much greater posting activity than their smaller counterparts.

The current study applies content analysis to scrutinize the relationship between Twitter messaging tactics employed by 186 Public Benefit Organizations (PBO) and public reactions in the form of liking, retweeting and commenting behaviour. The results indicate that Twitter plays a marginal role in the Polish PBO, and it seems to be at most complementary to the much more frequently utilized Facebook. Furthermore, the size of the organization does not affect the frequency of the published content on Twitter. Multiple regression analysis indicated that the most important factor influencing audience engagement was the Twitter profile number of followers. It explained the largest percentage of variance in terms of the average number of retweets, the average number of likes, and the percentage of tweets that were then commented on.

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Dialogic communication, which derives from a two-way symmetrical communication model, is considered to be an important foundation for long-lasting positive relationships with organizations and the public. The purpose of the current study was to examine the largest Polish Public Benefit Organization Web sites to determine the extent to which they use dialogic communication rules in relationship building. Also, the relation between the Web site dialogic potential and the amount of organizational revenue was scrutinized. The revenue was analyzed on two levels: total revenue acquired during the tax year and the amount of the annual 1 % of personal income tax. The results of the study indicate that Web sites of analyzed organizations fail to fully implement the dialogic communication principles. The statistical correlation between the sum of annual revenue and 1 % of personal income tax and the utilization of dialogic principles was partially supported. Nonprofits appeared to show their greatest strengths in providing basic information to online users, such as a mission statement, organization logo and history, short loading time, general contact information on the homepage and major links on the homepage to subpages. Organizational division into three clusters highlighted quite significant differences in the utilization of dialogic principles. The Web sites of the largest Polish PBOs in terms of total annual revenue and 1 % of personal income tax are characterized by significantly higher dialogic communication potential.