Digital pathways in project communication: A process study of community engagement

Community engagement is fundamental for project success. However, establishing genuine connections with community members is hindered by limited project time and the variety of interests involved. In this context, social networking sites (SNS) have been shown to be a powerful engagement tool as long as they are strategically leveraged by project organizations. Yet key features of these platform dynamics remain underexplored in the PM literature. To advance our knowledge, this study aims to understand the communication process enacted on SNS by project organizations for community engagement. To this end, we conducted a process study on a sports event where such platforms are consistently exploited for engaging the online community. The internal perspective enabled the underlying organizational processes to be detected. Our findings revealed that project communication acted in practice as a dynamic process relying on the discursive patterns with the online community and affected by the external context.