**1. Introduction**

Nonprofit organisations (NPOs) co-create services and social value through public participation in resource integrating activities such as donations, advocacy, social support, and recognition. The need for public participation has prompted the adoption of social networking platforms (SNPs) to allow supporters, donors, and volunteers, who act as "free agents", to work jointly with organisations [1]. SNPs, often called social media, "employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss and modify user-generated content" ([2], p. 241). The power of SNPs for organisations remains in the opportunities for public participation,

involvement, and engagement in organisational activities. For NPOs, Twitter enables strategic engagement of stakeholders through dialogic and communitybuilding practices better than company websites [3]. Broadly, SNPs are recognised for organisational visibility, information sharing, community, relationship building, and taking action [3, 4]. Beyond such basic capabilities, SNPs are increasing getting recognised for their interactive resources that enable collaboration [5], co-creation [6], and innovation [7].

The many opportunities afforded by SNPs are not just an end in themselves but mechanisms for the co-creation of nonprofit services [8]. Co-creation involves interactions between the community and organisations in creative activities [9]. SNPs have become instrumental in public *participation*, *involvement*, and *engagement* in nonprofit services [10]; moreover, the three activities are critical pillars of service co-creation [11]. Similarly, collaborative networked organisations and communities enable co-innovation and value co-creation [9]; but such outcomes are driven by the platform capabilities and the relationships between actors [12, 13]. Collaborative networked organisations often seek to build productive and sustainable relationships with a target community, and such relationships are here coined as organisation-community relationships (OCRs). OCRs are seemingly productive at the start, especially when NPOs pursue advocacy-based goals [14]; but, the relationships slowly collapse and become unproductive in due course [10, 15]. This trend can be attributed to the limited use of SNP interactive capabilities, which reduces the organisation's network activity [16, 17]. Particularly, the use of SNPs as co-creative platforms calls for a thorough understanding of the properties, structure, or types of OCR [13].

Most NPOs have a social media page, but such presence does not in itself advance OCR, create awareness of the organisation's activities, or trigger an influx of community participation [18]. Similarly, information sharing is a common practice but does not directly facilitate community engagement [17] and service co-creative activities [8]. Conversely, research, planning, and focused implementation of SNPs could pave the way for productive OCR [18]. NPOs could succeed in SNP implementation if two considerations are met [19], i.e., understand how to build online relationships and establish an ongoing positive and valuable bond with their audience. Increasing online network activity (involvement) is the first step to generating significant returns for NPOs and building long-term support from their community (ibid). Undeniably, "cultivating supporter relationships" is crucial and is the next best step to enabling collaboration and building affinity in stakeholder communities [20]. However, the dynamics of surrounding these relationships are often lost in translation, for instance the nature of such relationships, influencing factors, and associated outcomes. Responding studies, e.g., [21–25] have articulated relationship types and characteristics but the factors for productive OCR are yet to be explained. Responding to the issues and research gap mentioned above, this chapter seeks to address the question that what factors influence the organisationcommunity relationships in CoSNPs and how can such factors be classified?

This chapter discusses the co-creative potential of SNPs coined as co-creative social networking platforms (CoSNPs), the cultivation of OCR on these platforms, and the influencing factors. We discuss the potential of such platforms to drive productive OCR in the co-creation of nonprofit services and draw on the ecological systems perspective [26] to identify the influencing factors. The ecological systems perspective draws our attention to how organisations operate with their environment, internal and external [27]. Based on this perspective, the chapter illustrates multi-level influences shaping OCR in CoSNPs. The rest of the chapter is divided into six sections. In Section 2, we provide related work on the characteristics of CoSNPs and OCR and articulate the emergence, growth, and collapse of OCR in

*Building Organisation-Community Relationships in Co-Creative Social Networking Platforms… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99732*

CoSNPs. Section 3 introduces the ecological systems perspective into the organisational context to classify multi-level influences of OCR in CoSNPs. In Section 4, we deduce four theoretical propositions and present a model of multi-level ecological influences of OCR in CoSNPs. In Section 5, we discuss our observations and provide implications for practice. Lastly, in Section 6, we conclude our discussion and provide some directions for future research.
