The development of commercial revenue streams allows traditional nonprofit organizations to increase financial certainty in response to the reduction of traditional funding sources and increased ...competition. In order to capture commercial revenue-generating opportunities, traditional nonprofit organizations need to deliberately transform themselves into social enterprises. Through the theoretical lens of institutional entrepreneurship, we explore the institutional work that supports this transformation by analyzing field interviews with 64 institutional entrepreneurs from UK-based social enterprises. We find that the route to incorporate commercial processes and convert traditional nonprofit organizations into social enterprises requires six distinct kinds of institutional work at three different domains; these are—“engaging commercial revenue strategies”, “creating a professionalized organizational form”, and “legitimating a socio-commercial business model”. In elaborating on social entrepreneurship research and practice, we offer a comprehensive framework delineating the key practices contributing to the transformation from traditional nonprofit organizations to social enterprises. This extends our understanding of the
ex-ante
strategy of incorporating commercial processes within social organizations. Furthermore, the identification of these practices also offers an important tool for scholars in this field to examine the connection (or disconnection) of each practice with different ethical concerns of social entrepreneurship in greater depth.
This research note identifies seven key dimensions of the nonprofit sector that nonprofit stakeholders want to monitor to assess the sector’s condition, including financial resources; human ...resources; the diversity of nonprofit boards, staff, and clients; the impact of the nonprofit sector; advocacy activity; ethical and legal behavior; and the existence of a supportive environment. The article then describes current measures of these dimensions, noting the shortcomings of many of these measures. Two government data sources, the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) and the Current Population Survey (CPS), are highlighted that contain timely information about the nonprofit sector but which, to date, have been underutilized by sector stakeholders. Next, the article describes the picture of the nonprofit sector that emerges from the relevant measures before concluding with discussion of further work needed to improve measurement of the sector.
Tweeting Social Change Guo, Chao; Saxton, Gregory D.
Nonprofit and voluntary sector quarterly,
02/2014, Volume:
43, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
How are nonprofit organizations utilizing social media to engage in advocacy work? We address this question by investigating the social media use of 188 501(c)(3) advocacy organizations. After ...briefly examining the types of social media technologies employed, we turn to an in-depth examination of the organizations’ use of Twitter. This in-depth message-level analysis is twofold: A content analysis that examines the prevalence of previously identified communicative and advocacy constructs in nonprofits’ social media messages; and an inductive analysis that explores the unique features and dynamics of social media-based advocacy and identifies new organizational practices and forms of communication heretofore unseen in the literature.
Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) contribute to society through their social value creation. They operate in an increasingly turbulent context where building sustainable organizations has emerged as a ...critical need. Past authors have discussed this important issue in a fragmented manner. Using multiple case studies of socially entrepreneurial NPOs, this paper examines how the need for building a sustainable organization has impacted on the strategy focus of the nonprofit organization. The findings suggest that in response to an increased competitive environment, NPOs have been forced to adopt an organizational sustainability focus in both strategic and operational levels of management. The study makes a strong contribution to current debate in social entrepreneurship and to a broader agenda concerned with developing sustainable organizations. Whilst the findings have important implications for theory and current practice, the paper concludes with suggestions for future research at the interstices of these areas.
This paper studies a sequential resource allocation problem motivated by distribution operations of a nonprofit organization. The alternate objectives that arise in nonprofit (as opposed to ...commercial) operations lead to new variations on traditional problems in operations research and inventory management. Specifically, we consider the problem of distributing a scarce resource to meet customers' demands that are observed sequentially. An allocation policy that seeks to maximize profit may lead to inequitable distributions among customers. Our work in a nonprofit setting solves the sequential resource allocation problem with an objective function aimed at
equitable
and
effective
service. We define service in terms of fill rate (the ratio of the allocated amount to observed demand) and develop an objective function to maximize the expected minimum fill rate among customers, which balances equity in fill rates with effectiveness in the use of resources (low waste). Through a dynamic programming framework, we characterize the structure of the optimal allocation policy for a given sequence of customers when demand follows continuous probability distributions. We use that optimal structure to develop a heuristic allocation policy for instances with discrete demand distribution. In addition, we identify customer demand properties to consider when sequencing customer visits to optimize the fill rate objective. For both inventory allocation and customer sequencing decisions, the proposed heuristic methods yield near-optimal solutions.
Scholars and practitioners have argued that effective financial management, particularly the development of operating reserves, can help nonprofits survive economic shocks. The COVID-19 pandemic, ...which has had a significant impact on the nonprofit sector, provides an opportunity to test whether nonprofits have followed that recommendation, and if so, whether nonprofits with operating reserves were better prepared for the pandemic. Using data from an original survey of more than 600 nonprofit human service and arts organizations, administered when most states had stay-at-home restrictions, we show that most nonprofits experienced an immediate impact on their programs and financing. Yet, those nonprofits with more reserves were less likely to reduce operating hours, lose staff, or experience difficulty acquiring supplies or vendor services. Our study provides rare empirical data on the benefits of operating reserves for nonprofits. Our results also confirm that arts and culture nonprofits were more severely affected than human service nonprofits.
The Market for Charitable Giving List, John A.
The Journal of economic perspectives,
04/2011, Volume:
25, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Through good and bad economic times, charitable gifts have continued to roll in largely unabated over the past half century. In a typical year, total charitable gifts of money now exceed 2 percent of ...gross domestic product. Moreover, charitable giving has nearly doubled in real terms since 1990, and the number of nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS grew by nearly 60 percent from 1995 to 2005. This study provides a perspective on the economic interplay of three types of actors: donors, charitable organizations, and government. How much is given annually? Who gives? Who are the recipients of these gifts? Would changes in the tax treatment of charitable contributions lead to more or less giving? How can charitable institutions design mechanisms to generate the greatest level of gifts? What about the effectiveness of seed money and matching grants?
The development of social enterprise initiatives within nonprofit organizations is a complex activity and the disruptive challenges of accommodating commercial processes within social organizations ...are often underestimated. This article is based on research that tracks four nonprofit organizations as they endeavor to develop their first social enterprise activities. Using a lens of institutional logics with the emerging empirical findings, six discernible differences are identified between nonprofits and for-profits which usefully inform our understanding of the challenges of accommodating both commercial and social logics. Building upon existing theory, this article offers a typology of structural options for a social enterprise that nonprofits might consider, with illustrative examples from the research findings.
Empirical observations increasingly evidence that nonprofit organizations are becoming a less distinctive form of organization due to commercialization and the adoption of government practices. This ...fact challenges nonprofit theory development, which lags behind the development of practices in the field. This study examines one representative service nonprofit and asks how and why it is similar to and, simultaneously, different from private and public organizations. The purpose is to contribute to the debate on the assumption of nonprofit theory—should we study nonprofits as a distinct form of organization or perhaps as hybrids? The case study reveals that the case organization’s self-sustaining mechanism is based on value that generates many kinds of assistance at no cost. This mechanism, paired with a community base and a not-for-profit identity, formulates a distinct nonprofit model. However, due to the inadequacy of the value-based self-sustaining mechanism, the organization has to adopt business and government practices.
This paper studies the strategies employed by Catholic and Protestant nonprofit hospitals in Germany and traces them back to the theological foundations of those religions. Using a unique data set, ...we find that Catholic nonprofit hospitals follow a strategy of horizontal diversification and maximization of the number of patients treated. By contrast, Protestant hospitals pursue a strategy of horizontal specialization and focus on vertical differentiation, putting in more sophisticated inputs and producing more complex services. These effects increase if the environment of a hospital gets more competitive. We present a model that rationalizes the strategic differences as a result of the difference between Catholic and Protestant values identified in the literature. We then test alternative explanations to the observed empirical differences and show that none of them is supported by the data.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2945
.
This paper was accepted by Olav Sorenson, organizations.
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