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s PR should focus on building a 'sense of community' by nurturing relationships built on trust, reciprocity that benefit both organisations and their stakeholders. She offers a model to explain the process of social capital, which involves understanding the views of stakeholders with whom you have a relationship and how they may affect the key elements of social capital, such as reciprocity, as such the absence of presence of such factors will affect the ability to nurture mutually beneficial relationships and community spirit.

Taking forward this idea in the charity context is Strauss (2010), who believes structuring PR efforts around building this social capital 'may prove a fertile field for developments that will benefit non- profit organisations suffering from a scarcity of physical capital, allowing then to pursue their mission-based goals and hopefully change society for the better' (Strauss, 2010, p10).It offers charities a way to foster this essential part of their make-up therefore increasing their possibility of successfully addressing societal issues(Strauss 2010).

In an effort to develop this concept Strauss (2010) has proposed a social capital based model to assist charities in structuring their public relations. It starts by getting charities to assess the value of the social capital in their existing relationships. By measuring the elements within these relationships that are likely to generate social capital, such as reciprocity, charities can understand the social capital in existence within these connections. From here charities can identify if there are any opportunities to build both the bonding and bridging social capital and set about activities to do so.

However for this idea to become meaningful in practice, Strauss (2010) admits herself that empirical research on her model is required, something that has yet to been undertaken from either the charity perspective or those of their stakeholders. She considers this research particularly important because of the 'dearth of available literature that specifically examines the non-profit organisations' public relations efforts from a theoretical perspective' (Strauss, 2010, p5). She therefore calls for studies to help better understand the process of creating social capital and the value it has for charities and whether it is a viable concept around which charities can structure their PR. Strauss also suggests investigations are needed to identify the specific communication tactics that generate social capital for charities e.g. social media. These tactics, she suggests, would need to foster trust and reciprocity and contribute to the network characteristics that foster social capital (Strauss 2010).

Online charity public relations and social capital
In the above section the idea is put forward that nurturing social capital of the type described by Putman( 2000) could be used to give charity public relations efforts both a structure and a goal ( Luoma-aho 2009; Strauss 2010). Also highlighted is a call for research into whether SNSs could help in these efforts (Strauss 2010). This call is echoed by a number of other authors (Taylor 2010; Lovejoy and Saxton, 2012) but despite this there remain very few studies that explore this link.

What is available, however, are numerous PR studies that ident