Nonprofit organizations increasingly rely on earned revenue to sustain their mission-driven activities. Previous research examining the effects of earned revenue on other income streams tends to study earned revenue in the aggregate. Using panel data from 12,372 organizations from 2010 to 2015, this analysis applies a framework of revenue embeddedness to link earned revenue activities to mission and analyze the effects of earned revenue activities on donations. Earned revenue activities offering new products or services to existing donors appear to complement individual donations. These findings have theoretical and practical applications related to how nonprofits pursue earned revenue.

Many non-profit organizations rely on volunteers to further their mission, but volunteer rates linger at only 25% of the population. Increasing the volunteer rate can positively impact society in a myriad of ways, including benefits to for-profit organizations. One potential way to increase volunteerism rates is by aligning volunteering with work-related outcomes of interest to employers, since many volunteers are employed. Following recovery theory, we use responses to a survey of working adults to investigate whether volunteers are more engaged and engage in more organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) than those who do not volunteer. We found that the meaningfulness and type of volunteer activity relate to both employee engagement and OCBs at work. Implications of these findings as well as opportunities for both practice and future research are discussed.

HIV civil society advocacy in Vietnam is shaped by a unique fusion of historic and contemporary influences, resulting in nuanced ways in which advocacy is practised. In this study, we interviewed representatives from civil society, the Government of Vietnam, international NGOs, multilateral and research organisations and commercial consultancies to identify the influences on advocacy practice today. Aspects of Confucianism, Buddhism, Communism and changes to international funding were all identified as shaping HIV civil society policy advocacy practice directed towards government. These influences have resulted in a strong respect for hierarchy, non-confrontational and collaborative working relationships between civil society and the government, decision-making by consensus and changes in advocacy practice corresponding to fluctuations in international funding. This study shows how, as civil society continues to develop its role in the HIV sector in Vietnam, it is critical to understand these complex influences so that program designers, funders and evaluators can appropriately support HIV civil society policy advocacy.

This paper examines time allocation and satisfaction with time use of volunteers and non-volunteers. Using data from the German Time Use Survey, we find that volunteers spend more time on work-related activities. Moreover, time use choices are associated with women’s propensity to volunteer and men’s satisfaction with time use, which is a proxy for individual well-being. Controlling for possible endogeneity of volunteering, our results suggest that volunteering needs to be treated as endogenous for women, while volunteering is an exogenous and positive predictor for men’s time use satisfaction.

The social entrepreneurship literature increasingly acknowledges that the board of directors is of major importance in dealing with the multiple goal pursuit of social enterprises. Using a team production perspective, we study the relationship between stakeholder knowledge in the board and the engagement of the board in counseling and decision-making (i.e., board service performance) and subsequent organizational performance. The results of our study, using a sample of Flemish social enterprises, reveal that board stakeholder knowledge is positively related to board service performance. This relationship is moderated by board behavioral integration, which is strengthening the relationship in case of high stakeholder knowledge. Finally, while board service performance is positively related to social performance and, specifically, the social goal of hiring disadvantaged people, it is not significantly related to financial performance.

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) often find themselves under pressure to invest all of their available income in mission-related activities rather than in capacity building. We investigate one factor that can influence the decision to invest in such capacity-building tasks: funding sources pursued by an organization. Drawing on the benefits theory of nonprofit finance, we take these funding sources as predetermined by an organization’s mission and propose an extension of the theory by linking it to economic multitasking theory, which states that organizations prioritize tasks that offer greater and more measurable rewards. Through regression analyses of survey data from Swiss nonprofits, we analyze the extent to which funding sources sought affect the amount of effort invested in three areas of capacity building: public relations, impact focus, and resource attraction parameters. The results support the predictions of multitasking theory by showing that the effort invested in certain capacity-building tasks is affected considerably by seeking a specific funding source. The effects are stronger for resource attraction-related tasks than for tasks closer to the service delivery of NPOs. The results indicate that an organization’s mission affects not only the available funding sources but also the extent to which an organization invests in its capacities, which can lead to a ‘lock-in’ status for organizations.

An area of ongoing debate is whether neighborhood organizations contribute to civic governance by enabling citizen influence in government, mobilizing constituents, and improving policy outcomes through localized knowledge, community organizing, and civic engagement. This article presents the findings of a study to understand the roles and contributions of neighborhood organizations in civic governance. The research design consisted of an exploratory and qualitative case study of individual interviews with 46 board presidents who described the roles of their neighborhood organizations within communities, in relationship to a city, and whether, and to what extent, they contributed to civic governance. Study participants characterized their neighborhood organizations’ roles according to three core themes: developing community and improving the neighborhood, educating and engaging citizens, and representing and advocating for the neighborhood. The findings reveal significant resource limitations that constrain civic engagement and participation capacities. Thus, as a result of the findings, I contend that there are several opportunities to strengthen their roles and contributions in civic governance.

This study presents an interdisciplinary systematic review of the literature on donation-based and reward-based crowdfunding. The literature to date has explored differences in crowd’s behavior and incentives for participating in the platform, as well as the factors governing funding and post-funding success. The authors summarize the main findings to date and synthesize the different theoretical explanations for the decision-making behavior of the crowd. The investigation reveals how the literature to date has upheld the importance of crowdfunding as a social and democratic tool, one that demonstrates wise judgment and clairvoyance in recognizing potential successes and creating value for society.

This study compiles the main findings in the field of academic research on pure donation-based crowdfunding (DCF) soliciting monetary contributions for charitable causes. To this purpose, a systematic literature review is conducted, resulting in 92 scientific publications analyzed for the first time in this field of research. The prevailing thematic dimensions and research gaps are identified and discussed. The incipient literature on DCF, with a majority of publications from 2015 onward in the form of empirical articles using quantitative methodologies, focuses on antecedents related to individual donors, organizational promoters as main actors, and online channels and design-related features of campaigns as enablers. However, the effects of DCF on relevant stakeholders (particularly beneficiaries and society in general) remain largely obscure. Based on this analysis, an integrated conceptual framework on DCF is proposed to guide future research. This framework, susceptible of empirical evaluation, allows characterizing the DCF as a distinct and emerging type of philanthropic funding model based on specific and novel antecedents, actors, enablers and effects.

Focusing on the low-cost nature of social media participation, previous studies have described social media as providing opportunities for nonprofit organizations to gain support for their campaigns, such as asking to click a button. However, the question remains whether and how social media participation subsequently encourages community-based (offline) participation. Extending previous studies’ focus on the actual cost of social media participation, we examine how perceived costs and benefits of social media participation motivate individuals to participate in community-based participation. Our analysis of two-way between-subjects ANCOVA demonstrated that the perceived benefits of initial social media participation, rather than its actual or perceived costs, drive individuals to identify with the issue and engage in subsequent community-based participation. This finding suggests that the meaning of social media participation does not lie in whether it allows for low-cost actions, but in how individuals perceive and appreciate the benefits from their actions and identify with the issue.

This paper examines how the government harnesses the development of social enterprises. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study in Chengdu City, China, we find that institution building, financial supporting, incubation developing, systematical cultivating and resource matchmaking are the main strategies employed by the municipal government to promote the development of social enterprises, whereupon we argue that besides the role as referee and sponsor which are the governments’ traditional roles in western countries, the government in China also play a role of coach in harnessing the development of social enterprises. This paper contributes to the literature by theorizing how administrative forces affect the growth of hybrid organizations and also contributes to providing empirical evidence of the institutional environment of social enterprises in China.

This article analyzes various roles of development practitioners (called outsiders) in five different cases of community-based development (CBD) in rural Iran. It provides a review of the literature on CBD and identifies three main types of roles fulfilled by outsiders to support indigenous development processes. These include preparing the ground, activating community-based organizations as participatory institutions, and taking on the role of brokers who bridge the gap between the local community and outside institutions—especially the state and market. From the analysis of empirical qualitative data collected during fieldwork in Iran, the article concludes that while the roles played by the outsiders in CBD interventions there correspond mostly to those identified in the literature, there are differences in their strategies of intervention and activities under each role which correspond with their contextual contingencies. Recognizing this variation is needed to deepen the understanding of CBD practices and help practitioners think about alternative perspectives and approaches.

Social enterprises pursue a dual mission: on the one hand, they strive for social purpose, while on the other, they try to achieve economic stability despite scarce resources. To achieve the dual mission, social enterprises avail themselves of both for-profit and non-profit institutional logics. Due to this combination of multiple institutional logics, such enterprises can be classified as hybrid organizations. This study focuses on these organizations and investigates tensions between social enterprises and various stakeholder groups caused by the use of commercial logics within the social sector. In particular, we examine the perception of commercial versus social welfare logics by various stakeholder groups, and investigate the effects on organizational communication. Our study is centered on social franchise enterprises. We use an exploratory qualitative research approach based on semi-structured interviews with 21 social franchisors and social franchisees of seven social franchise enterprises. Our main results suggest that the use of commercial logics in the social sector tends to decrease the legitimacy of social franchise enterprises in the eyes of internal stakeholders, the general public, and various (but not all) external stakeholder groups. Many stakeholders of social franchise enterprises show a strong aversion to commercial logics, and particularly to commercial terminology. Overall, we conclude that social franchise enterprises very consciously apply commercial and social welfare logics and use alternative terminology where necessary to retain legitimacy and prevent tensions.

A burgeoning line of research examines nonprofit advocacy, yet few have examined how nonprofits advocate against policy objectives. We explore how groups serve client needs by examining immigrant-serving organizations shaping local enforcement of federal immigration removal policies. We demonstrate how groups have helped to reshape national immigration enforcement through the litigation process. These organizations play a vital role in providing legal aid to individuals facing removal. With information on 1079 nonprofits, we predict regional removal numbers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We find that the availability of nonprofit pro bono legal aid does predict local removal rates. Regions with greater numbers of pro bono attorney groups produce fewer immigration removals, controlling for other factors. The number of non-attorney advocates in a region predicts fewer non-criminal immigrant removals. This finding is important for both scholars and immigrant advocates at a time of heightened national enforcement.

Policy institutes, or “think tanks”, are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our societies. In this article, we conceptualize think tanks explicitly as a civil society phenomenon, linking the proliferation of this relatively new type of actor to the transformation of civil society structures and of systems of interest representation. Using the case of Sweden as an illustration, we argue that the recent decades’ rise of think tanks in institutional settings outside of the USA can only be understood if we take into account the particular features and institutional policy access opportunities of the domestic civil society in each national case, and that think tanks should be analytically understood as the allies of, rather than competitors to, the older, established forces in civil society.

Although the differences between volunteers and paid workers have been well studied, whether the perceived differences are stereotyped and how such stereotypes might influence people’s judgments of volunteers and paid workers remain unclear. This research examines the stereotypes of volunteers versus paid workers in terms of warmth and competence and the possible influences of these stereotypes on client trust in volunteers versus paid workers. Two experimental studies were conducted in China. We find that volunteers are judged to be warmer and less competent than paid workers based on their different roles. We also find that volunteers elicit a lower level of cognition-based trust and a higher level of affect-based trust than paid workers. These findings illustrate the stereotypes of volunteers versus paid workers in terms of warmth and competence and shed light on the consequences of the stereotypes. Other possible consequences and the causes of these stereotypes are also discussed.

Nonprofit scholars have long considered stakeholder targeting communication (STC), an important mechanism of organizational accountability to meet stakeholders’ diverse interests and needs. However, research has yet to systematically examine the antecedents and outcomes of organizations’ STC to advance a more comprehensive understanding of how organizations manage accountability demands in the digital era. To address this gap, this study proposes a conceptual framework to explain how organizations’ STC on social media (SM) is shaped by STC via non-SM channels and their external communication capacity and the resulting STC outcomes in the SM domain. Survey data from 156 humanitarian relief and development organizations on four continents showed that using non-SM channels to engage various groups of stakeholders helped build organizations’ external communication capacity, which in turn helped improve their engagement in STC on SM. STC on SM further contributed to organizations’ success in information dissemination, community building, and action mobilization outcomes on SM.

The formation of social entrepreneurial intention (SEI) is a topic that attracts scholars’ attention recently. Previous studies in the literature mention the importance of personal background on the formation of such intentions (Mair and Noboa, in: Social entrepreneurship: How intentions to create a social venture are formed. In “social entrepreneurship” (pp. 121–135). Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2006); Dorado in Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship 11:1–24, 2006; Scheiber in VOLUNTAS International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations. 27:1694–1717, 2016; Bacq and Alt in Journal of Business Venturing 33:333–350, 2018; Hockerts in Journal of Social Entrepreneurship 9:234–256, 2018). However, these studies often use samples from a limited number of countries and/or regions. The aim of this study is twofold. First, this study aims to examine whether the main antecedents of SEI (major hardship, radical change, encountering others’ hardship, and role model) offered in our previous study (Asarkaya and Keles Taysir in Nonprofit Management and Leadership 30:155–166, 2019 based on a sample from a specific country, is applicable within a global context and across different fields. Second, various functions of the main antecedents that lead to the formation of SEI are explored. The list of Ashoka fellows is utilized, and the personal details of 255 social entrepreneurs are analyzed. There are some common patterns in these narratives, supporting the potential influence of the main antecedents. In addition, the weights of these antecedents vary across different fields; and they have distinct functions through which SEI is formed.

While more and more people have been forced from their homes by natural disasters, wars, and violence, the citizens of the least developed countries are facing problems like famine, epidemics, and lack of education, chronically. Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are challenging these situations with their limited sources. We aim to define the main organizational factors affecting individuals to donate to NPOs in the Turkish context. For this purpose, a theoretical model was developed by combining models of prominent studies in the literature, and structural equation modeling was performed by employing data gained via a survey on donors of Yeryüzü Doktorları (Doctors Worldwide Turkey) to validate the model. As a result, past donations, brand image, and familiarity positively affect intention to donate to NPOs, while there is not a significant relationship between typicality and intention to donate to NPOs in the Turkish context. Therefore, Turkish NPOs can evaluate their fund-raising and branding strategy and redesign their fund-raising processes by considering these findings.

There is an increasing attention for youth social work professionals to collaborate with volunteers, parents, and other professionals. Collaboration can contribute to positive outcomes for youth. The present study contributes to understanding differences in the extent to which youth social work professionals collaborate with volunteers, parents, and other professionals. The survey was conducted with Dutch professionals working in youth care (n = 112), education (n = 67), and youth work (n = 89). Index for Interdisciplinary Collaboration was used to assess interdependence in and reflection on the collaboration process. Significant differences were found in the extent to which professionals working in different fields experience interdependence and reflection on the collaboration process with different partners. Future researchers should be aware that the degree to which professionals collaborate with others might depend on the context, work field, and the collaboration partner. Youth social work professionals and local governments can use this study to identify strong and weak collaborative partnerships in order to better organize collaboration between different partners with the final aim of improving support of young people.