Interstitial organizations as conversational bridges

Routledge Handbook of Nonprofit Communication, 2022

The declining informal collaboration corresponds to less civic engagement, political equity, solidarity, trust, and tolerance as well as associational life. In 2020, a case study of two NPOs revealed that one was adopting a strong entrepreneurial orientation, while the other integrated the traditional community orientation with more professionalization, confirming to partial marketization tendencies. The NGO-ization of society, visible in the increasing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at the national and transnational level, tend to somewhat contradict Putnam’s thesis. On the other hand, the number of NGOs is not per se revealing of the quality of citizen participation in those organizations. The terms NGOS and nonprofit can be applied to the same organizational forms – some authors tend to consider the former as a type of nonprofit. Interestingly enough, in the diversity of approaches, and even definitions of this object, there is a common use of the excluding element to classify it: nongovernmental and nonprofit.

Nonprofit incubators spend valuable resources for helping small nonprofits to build capacity for their survival. Alliances and collaborations with their peers also play an important role in nonprofit capacity building process. In this article, we examine factors determining how nonprofits build collaborative ties from incubators’ perspective. We collected data from nonprofits that participated in a Strengthening Communities Funds project supported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Florida. The project provided equipment, financial, and educational support to community based small nonprofits. Findings show organizations are likely to revitalize their past collaborative ties due to a high level of trust and positive reputations. However, their past friendship relationships are almost as equally important as their past collaborative ties. We recommend both nonprofit managers and incubators spend a significant effort to maintain trust via informal relationships (i.e. social capital).

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference of Business, Accounting, and Economics, ICBAE 2022, 10-11 August 2022, Purwokerto, Central Java, Indonesia

This research aims to understand the "depth" of reality and uncover the transparency and accountability behind the reality of the virtual community of charity. The reality of social media that is the subject of research is the Friday charity community. The research paradigm uses Interpretive with Netnographic analysis tools. This finding is that good deliberation and communication are manifestations of transparency, while accountability is based on awareness to place God as the highest stakeholder.The forms of accountability that are disclosed are the submission/list of the number and names of donors, evidence of the use of fees, proof of transfer, documentation of the delivery of charity or responses/responses from the recipients of charity. Another value finding is the positive group atmosphere that arises from achieving a sense of balance and fairness.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations

How can computational social science (CSS) methods be applied in nonprofit and philanthropic studies? This paper summarizes and explains a range of relevant CSS methods from a research design perspective and highlights key applications in our field. We define CSS as a set of computationally intensive empirical methods for data management, concept representation, data analysis, and visualization. What makes the computational methods “social” is that the purpose of using these methods is to serve quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods social science research, such that theorization can have a solid ground. We illustrate the promise of CSS in our field by using it to construct the largest and most comprehensive database of scholarly references in our field, the Knowledge Infrastructure of Nonprofit and Philanthropic Studies (KINPS). Furthermore, we show that through the application of CSS in constructing and analyzing KINPS, we can better understand and facilitate the intellectua...

American Journal of Evaluation, 2011

Evaluating the performance of nonprofit organizations has been of growing importance for the last several decades. Although there is much good that can come out of self-improvement, there is substantial heterogeneity within the sector that calls into question the usefulness of ''across the board'' evaluation tools. In this article, the authors assess nonprofit evaluation practices, at both the organizational and the programmatic levels. Through a multitheoretical framework, the authors explore the extent to which the adoption and uses of evaluation reflect strategic alignment with heterogeneous nonprofit roles or the institutionalization of the organizational environment. The authors find evidence that institutional perceptions are consistent predictors of whether nonprofit organizations adopt particular practices. Diverse roles are not consistently associated with the adoption of particular practices, but the uses of evaluation are diverse and specific to nonprofit organizations' unique strategies and roles.

Public Relations Review, 2018

This exploratory study attempts to understand the role of nonprofits and their position in corporate social responsibility (CSR) partnership communication. Employing social network analysis, the study identifies and interprets the network strategies used by top U.S. nonprofits in communicating about their CSR partnerships on Twitter. The results show that although all the nonprofit issue sectors disclosed extensive business partnerships, they selectively mobilize communication with certain business partners. The present study extends the network approach in a CSR context. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed. Organizations are embedded in various social networks that require them to adapt to and influence the environment. A burgeoning line of inquiry has thus set out to examine public relations theories and practices from a network perspective (O'Connor & Shumate, 2018; Yang & Taylor, 2015). As Yang and Taylor (2015) suggested, a network perspective allows public relations scholars and practitioners to precisely locate an organizational-centric network, and comprehensively observe the organization's broad environment. From a network perspective, companies are not completely independent actors, but they are connected to other social actors to deal with the changing social environment and stakeholder expectations (Yang & Taylor, 2015). In response to the growing public demand for socially responsible businesses, companies and nonprofits are actively seeking cross-sector collaborations to expand their social impacts. Strategic partnerships between corporations and nonprofits have become a trendy form of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and public relations practitioners play a significant role in managing and communicating the partnerships (Kim & Reber, 2008; Waters & Ott, 2014). These nonprofit-business (N2B) partnerships leverage advantages of both nonprofit and business entities to solve complicated social problems such as environmental sustainability, human rights, public health, and/or poverty (

In the world of businesses and profitable institutions, one can easily get the feeling that the purpose and the work of nonprofit organizations is being underestimated and in a way even looked down upon, but the truth often lies elsewhere. This unjust environment has inspired me to dedicate this essay towards proving that the work that is done in these organizations is far from easy and insignificant- most of the time it is the exact opposite of common misconceptions. I will start this essay, by defining what a nonprofit organization is. Often when hearing the word nonprofit organization, people think of groups that feed children in Africa and work in preventing poverty and even though this is part of nonprofit work, the presence of these organizations in our everyday life is much more prevalent. I believe that by establishing a common ground in terms of a common concept will help recognize these organizations and their importance to our everyday life. In the second part of this chapter I will discuss just that, how crucial this organizations are and provide evidence for significance of our essay topic. I will back my arguments with relevant data from national economies of Canada and United States and prove that nonprofit organizations not only provide a significant share of GDP of both national economies, but also present essential share of jobs and engagement of local communities and overall population. After being clear on what nonprofit organizations are and how crucial their presence is to economies as well as social wellbeing of the people, we will look at the key problems that majority of nonprofits face. Moreover, I will connect the issues with the function of management and discuss, how these issues affect the organization’s governance. I will focus on the issue of revenue generation, stating that often nonprofits are being trapped between dependency on governmental funds and often restricted assets provided by donors, which is why we are able to recognize nonprofit management’s effort towards diversifying revenue structure and focusing more on their own independent sources of income. Argument will again be backed with relevant real world examples from multiple nonprofit industries. The second issue I will discuss is the measurement of success. Knowing that when it comes to nonprofits, there are many other things to look at rather than just profit and other financial measures, I will discuss the best way for a nonprofit to structure their evaluation of success and provide a case study example of organization that used the discussed approach method. Lastly, taking into account all of the previously discussed issues and trends I will discuss the future of the nonprofit sector. Considering the recent trend of nonprofits becoming more like businesses, I will draw implications about the changes in employment structure in nonprofits. More and more of MBA graduates are deciding to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector, because they want to make impact in the world not just serve for a big paycheck. Furthermore, I believe, we will see increased competition in this growing sector and increased presence of nonprofits on social media, because it is one of the most effective ways of engaging large pool of stakeholders, which nonprofits certainly have. I also talk about the increased trend of transparency of organizations in the future, because this is certainly one way to go about marketing and assuring your donors you are spending money in a legitimate matter and avoid having your funds restricted for only a specific use.

Media & jornalismo, 2023

Despite the importance of communication to the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) and, particularly, to the nonprofit sector, this field has, until recently, left unexaminedits specific features including social capital, accountability and governance, as well as effectiveness, civil engagement, and reputation from a communicative standpoint. Fortunately, recent years brought a growing scientific literature on multiple dimensions of Nonprofit Organizations (NPO) offering a thorough account of the theories, concepts and challenges that NPOs deal with in a changing, complex digital world. That's exactly what the reader will find in the latest Routledge Handbook. The Routledge Handbook of Nonprofit Communication is a much-needed, compact but comprehensive ready reference, designed to be easily consulted and provide a broad and clear picture of the state-of-the-art research on nonprofit communication. Although it is certainly not the first to address nonprofit organizations, it is one of the few books specifically focused on the Non-Governmental Organizations' different types of communication processes, stakeholder relationships, evolving discourses and communication campaigns. It does so from multidisciplinary and internationally diverse authors coming from communication, political science, marketing, economics, sociology and management domains. Despite management being the dominant field of the five major journals related to the nonprofit sector, this Handbook clearly intends to go beyond it and address NPO from a communicative perspective. In "Introducing nonprofit communication and mapping the research filed", the editors Gisela Gonçalves and Evandro Oliveira remark that the keywords "communication" and "nonprofit" have suffered a 50% increase in published articles (p.3). In addition, Public Relations Review is the first of the top five journals publishing research on nonprofit communication testifying the growing interest of studying it from a communicative standpoint. It is quite revealing-and appropriate-that both editors research on public relations and communication fields: Gisela Gonçalves is a professor and director of the Masters in Strategic Communication program at the University of Beira Interior, in Portugal while Evandro Oliveira is a public relations professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, in Spain. This is meaningful because a NPO is a social actor (formal organization, social movement, collective entity) in which its goals, purposes and mission are undoubtedly fulfilled through active communicative processes. The book gathers a staggering number of 48 contributions structured in four parts: beginning with metatheoretical and multidisciplinary approaches to the nonprofit sector, where two chapters are about the NGO-ization of civil society (Lang)