Search results

Zakat (Islamic almsgiving) plays a considerable role in dealing with the socioeconomic issues in times of COVID-19 pandemic, and such roles have been widely discussed in virtual events. This paper aims to discover knowledge of the current global zakat administration from virtual events of zakat (e.g. webinars) on YouTube and Zoom via text mining approach.

The authors purposefully sampled 12 experts from four different virtual zakat events on YouTube and Zoom. The automated text transcription software is used to pull the information from the sampled videos into text documents. A qualitative analysis is operated using text mining approach via machine learning tool (i.e. Orange Data Mining). Four research questions are developed under the Word Cloud visualisation, hierarchal clustering, topic modelling and graph and network theory.

The machine learning identifies the most important words, the relationship between the experts and their top words and discovers hidden themes from the sample. This finding is practically substantial for zakat stakeholders to understand the current issues of global zakat administration and to learn the applicable lessons from the current issues of zakat management worldwide.

This study does not establish a positivist generalisation from the findings because of the nature and objective of the study.

A policy implication is drawn pertaining to the legislation of zakat as an Islamic financial policy instrument for combating poverty in Muslim society.

This work supports the notion of “socioeconomic zakat”, implying that zakat as a religious obligation is important in shaping the social and economic processes of a Muslim community.

This work marks the novelty in making sense of the unstructured data from virtual events on YouTube and Zoom in the Islamic social finance research.

Despite the COVID-19 recession, the collection of zakat (almsgiving) managed by the National Board of Zakat Republic of Indonesia (BAZNAS RI) has increased, especially during Ramaḍān 1441 Hijra. Previous works show a positive relationship between digital zakat campaign and zakat collection. This paper aims to study the means of digital zakat campaign during COVID-19 outbreak. This topic is theoretically and practically important in the emerging debate of Islamic marketing, notably in Islamic social finance field.

This paper uses a qualitative research approach. A case study is engaged in the selection of BAZNAS RI for a detailed discussion of a zakat organisation. Meanwhile, a netnographic approach is used to analyse the number of 549 posts from BAZNAS RI’s social media, which are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Furthermore, a qualitative software analysis of NVivo 12 Plus is used in performing the analytical procedures.

This work explains the means of digital zakat campaign during COVID-19 outbreak with a case of BAZNAS RI. It is identified the number of 6 parent nodes and 64 child nodes from the analysis using NVivo 12 Plus. The authors’ parent nodes are “donation”, “infaq” (Islamic spending for charities), “Ramaḍān matters”, “ṣadaqah” (voluntary charity), “virtual events” and “zakat”. These nodes detail digital campaign of BAZNAS RI posted in its social media during COVID-19 period in Ramaḍān. A theoretical implication of inclusive marketing is derived from the analysis. It explains that the inclusiveness of digital contents is practically significant in campaigning zakat as a religious obligation that contributes to social and financial benefits.

This paper does not claim a positivist perspective on the relationship between digital zakat campaign and zakat collection. Instead, this paper explores in-depth the practice of digital zakat campaign, which the previous study confirms its association with a muzakki’s (Muslims who are obliged to pay zakat) decision to pay zakat.

This paper establishes the Islamic marketing theory that is derived from industrial practices. The inclusiveness of digital contents in zakat campaign is critical in activating zakat as a religious obligation that authentically shapes the social and economic processes of a Muslim community. This theory is practically important for 'amils (employees) of zakat institution who work in the marketing division, chiefly to create such contents to post in social media.

The authors’ node of zakat distribution for COVID-19 relief indicates the importance of a formalised zakat institution to actualise zakat’s role in handling socioeconomic problems. Thus, paying zakat formally in an authorised organisation may contribute to a greater social contribution and maṣlaḥah (public interest) than paying it informally without any effective measurement.

This study contributes to the novelty in the Islamic marketing debate within two folds. First, this paper is among the pioneers in studying digital zakat campaign during COVID-19 outbreak by using a netnographic approach. Therefore, a theoretical implication derived from industrial practices is contributed. Second, this paper details the steps in using NVivo 12 Plus to analyse the unstructured data sampled from the internet. The future studies may thus refer to this work to understand the application of netnography and the procedures in analysing data from social media using this software.

Digital technology has been widely applied in zakat collection. Millennials, who are now dominating the productive phase and at their peak carrier path, are the potential target for zakat collection as their number reached 31.3% of the Indonesian population. On the other hand, public and private zakat institutions have attempted to optimize the country’s zakat potential, reaching 233.6tn rupiahs, through development of a digital platform for zakat collection. However, the gap between the actual collection of zakat with its potential is still large. This study aims to analyse the factors affecting millennials in paying zakat through direct payment or through digital platform of private or public zakat institutions.

Multinomial logistic regression method, which signifies the contribution of this study, is used to analyse factors influencing millennials in their zakat payment. In addition, cross-tabulation is used to classify the characteristics of respondents. Respondents are selected conveniently through a digital questionnaire distributed in February–March 2021. Respondents are also selected purposively based on their experience in paying zakat through direct, private or public zakat institutions, which are consisted of 50 respondents per each category; thus, the total becomes 150 respondents.

Based on the results, three variables, namely, education, accessibility and age, are found to have a significant influence on zakat payment through online platforms provided by private zakat institutions. Meanwhile, variables that influence zakat payment through online platforms provided by public zakat institutions are education, accessibility and income. This study also finds that millennials have the highest probability to select online platforms provided by private zakat institutions as a channel of their zakat payment. However, the overall result shows that millennials tend to pay directly to the mustahik (zakat recipients) rather than via online platforms, presumably because of their limited zakat literacy.

The purposive sampling technique used to determine the research samples limits the generalization of the study.

This paper establishes a new approach in analysing millennials preference in their zakat payment with digital inclusiveness. The use of a multinomial logistic approach, which has not been widely applied in such research, strengthens the analysis that is relevant to the need of both private and public zakat institutions to analyse determinants of millennials in paying their zakat through online platform. This study can be used as a reference to formulate a more effective marketing strategy for zakat collection. This paper also serves as an estimate of the preference with some selected typical characteristics of millennials by using a multinomial logistic approach.

Formal payment through the zakat institution theoretically is more preferable than direct payment to mustahik (zakat recipients) in the zakat campaign. However, based on this research, despite digital marketing and platforms having been well-used by both private and public zakat institutions, the millennials still prefer direct zakat payment than through online platforms. The findings of this research suggest the importance of strengthening zakat literacy through a more effective digital marketing strategy of zakat institutions which target the millennials.

This study fills the gap in the literature on how millennials choose their zakat payment method, whether through digital platforms developed by private and public zakat institutions or directly to the targeted zakat recipients. The use of multinomial logistic regression approach adds the novelty of this research.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the socio-economic factors that will affect women’s empowerment from an Islamic perspective (the Tawhidi epistemological approach) and the impact of women’s empowerment on reducing family poverty.

Using a quantitative approach to see the relationship between research variables with structural equation model-partial least squares as the analysis tool.

In general, socio-economic variables had direct and indirect effects on reducing family poverty. In addition, the variable of women’s empowerment in an Islamic perspective can strengthen the influence of socio-economic variables on the alleviation of family poverty.

The limitation of this research lies in the use of religiosity as an indicator with some constraints and the inclusion of all the necessary dimensions of a Muslim family. Additionally, because of the scope of the present research, the results may not be applicable in different areas, especially countries with distinctive characteristics such as having Muslims as the major population. On the other hand, the results of this research may provide comprehensive indicators of empowered Muslim women which enable the correlation between the socio-economic factors and women’s empowerment and how women’s empowerment can contribute to the alleviation of family poverty from the perspective of Islam.

This research provides new insights into the variable of women’s empowerment measured using the Islamic paradigm (Tawhidi epistemology) and includes religiosity as a variable that directly and indirectly influences the reduction of family poverty.