Social Media and School Bond Elections: An Examination of how Facebook Engagement Influenced Election Results.

Bond elections for Texas independent school districts are the seeds for new growth. School bond elections allow for capital improvement needs such as campus renovations for overcrowded classrooms or increases for teacher salaries. To advocate the passage of the bond, school districts will leverage social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. In this paper, we analyze how social media engagement impacts bond passage in social districts.
School bond elections are of integral interest in the inner workings of school district leadership and community stakeholders. Historically, bond election engagement strategies between the two stakeholders, as mentioned above, ranged from town hall meetings to a tri-fold informational pamphlet or fact sheet. Yet, with the rise of social media, in particular, Facebook, districts are using various social media platforms to engage with citizens on bond elections.
To examine the impact on social media on bond elections, we examine bond election data of 54 Texas independent school districts from May 4, 2019, in coincidence with each district’s social media engagement strategies on Facebook, has conferred the following hypothesis: competitive school bond elections produce an increase in social media engagement. It is theorized that the bonds which pass with a higher percentage have less social media engagement. Such a conclusion could infer that school district administrators turn towards Facebook to emphasize the necessity of passing a bond election, whereby Facebook engagement may alternatively evoke detrimental election results.
In this project, we explore:
-The degree to which social media serves as an effective catalyst in emphasizing organizational needs to stakeholders.
-The role of social media in local elections; a focus on Facebook's two-way engagement and the risk of generating complex interactions.
-Can voters sense a sales pitch? Desired results backfire when administration overcompensates.
-An involved discussion of finding a balance when sharing on social media; examining how to disseminate knowledge with stakeholders in a format that meets the organizational purpose and desired outcomes.
Nonetheless, social media is furthermore highly public and provides an immediate two-way communication stage. What a school district posts, or rather any organization could post, will be interacted with, negatively or positively. The solution is hence finding a balanced approach when employing a social media agent, specifically in regards to elections, that allows the modern-day public administrator efficient distribution of new knowledge that suffices organizational intentions.