Charitable fundraising once depended primarily upon a charity’s size, efficiency and longstanding reputation. That was before Razoo, Kickstarter, Facebook and Twitter came to town. In the first academic study to look at what determines charitable giving on social-media sites, Gregory Saxton, associate professor in the Department of Communication, and co-author Lili Wang from Arizona State, found that those media have created a more level playing field in the nonprofit world, one in which successful use of technology can make up for limited organizational size. Technology and social media, it turns out, can not only raise the online profile of even small organizations, but increase their support bases and their ability to generate donations online and off. That is among the findings of their recent article, “The Social Network Effect: Determinants of Giving Through Social Media."