Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This experimental study examined how varying the degree of immersiveness of a short documentary about a remote health issue influenced users’ reported spatial presence, empathic parasocial interaction, and individual issue involvement. Higher-order responses, namely, the desire for information and willingness to donate to the cause, were also analyzed. The documentary was shown to 85 participants using three different technologies with varying degrees of immersiveness (high, moderate, and low). The results show that the level of the technology’s immersiveness gradually increases the spatial presence, empathic parasocial interaction, and issue involvement of the user. While participants of the highly immersive condition reported a higher desire for additional information, the results on donation behavior were less conclusive.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Local nongovernmental organizations (local NGOs) based in less economically advanced countries suffer from a “liability of foreignness” in attracting international funding: They are geographically, linguistically, and culturally distant from funders in more economically advanced countries. As a result, although U.S. foundations gave 27,572 grants to support programming occurring within less economically advanced countries between 2000 and 2012, only 10.4% went to local NGOs within those areas. We argue that while favoring NGOs in more economically advanced countries minimizes funder-NGO foreignness, or the distance between the foundation and the grantee NGO, it increases NGO-programming foreignness, or the distance between the grantee NGO and the site of their programming, creating crucial trade-offs. We draw upon organizational theory to predict under what conditions U.S. foundations would fund local NGOs, finding that local NGOs receive more support from older foundations and those with greater geographic and program area experience. Furthermore, local NGOs receive larger, longer grants but with lower probabilities of being renewed. These results identify the conditions under which foundations “go the extra mile” and fund local NGOs.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Theory recognizes the need to account for the allocation of time across activities as a potential constraint on volunteering. Drawing on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), for the first time, this article examines the decision to volunteer by males and females accounting for their engagement in other leisure activities that also involve discretionary time. Instrumental variable panel-data estimates reveal that it is only for females that volunteering is influenced by the choice of other leisure activities. This implies that males have more autonomy over their volunteering decision relative to their other leisure behavior compared with females. For males, this greater autonomy suggests that volunteering is more closely linked to the concept of “serious leisure” and a form of work as it is more distinct from other leisure activities. These differences have implications for volunteer recruitment.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This research examines the effects of government funding on the service and advocacy roles of nonprofit organizations in China through a cross-regional comparison. Based on a nationwide survey of 2,058 nonprofits and in-depth interviews with 65 nonprofit executives from the same sample in 2013–2017, we find that a higher level of central government funding leads to stronger organizational capacity for service provision through leveraging matching funds and to more intensive administrative advocacy and media advocacy. Furthermore, a cross-regional comparison shows that, in contrast to those in nonwestern regions, nonprofit organizations with higher levels of central government funding in the western region engage in more administrative advocacy but less in media advocacy. Taken together, these findings highlight the importance of the government’s leverage strategy and selective empowerment in shaping nonprofits’ service and advocacy roles through government funding in China.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Neighborhoods may be important for formal volunteering because they vary in the extent to which they have institutions that support participation and problems that motivate participation. According to social heterogeneity and ethnic community theories, we should expect that living in ethnic enclaves, neighborhoods where residents are predominantly of the same ethnic group, would promote formal volunteering. Latino ethnic enclaves may also have more institutions and problems. However, no studies have examined neighborhood effects on formal volunteering among U.S.- and foreign-born Latinos. We investigated neighborhood-level predictors of formal volunteering among Latinos, and Mexican descent residents more specifically, using secondary data from Chicago, a Latino immigrant destination. We tested the effects of ethnic enclaves, neighborhood organizational resources, and neighborhood needs on formal volunteering. We found that Latinos in Chicago were less likely to participate in formal volunteering in ethnic enclaves when controlling for enclaves’ greater neighborhood needs, which positively influenced formal volunteering.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Capacity-building initiatives are popular among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide. In response to a lack of valid and reliable capacity measures for NGOs working on various social issues, Shumate and colleagues developed an 8-dimension, 45-item NGO capacities instrument, based on data from U.S. NGOs. However, the proliferation of international research on NGO capacity raises questions about the degree to which such an instrument equally applies in other countries. To allow meaningful comparisons of NGO capacities across countries, we examine the measurement equivalence of this NGO capacity instrument across a matched sample of Chinese (N = 119) and U.S. (N = 150) NGOs. Findings suggest a new NGO capacity instrument, which comprises seven factors and 28 items and better accounts for the capacity of both Chinese and U.S. NGOs. Based on the new instrument, a series of comparative analyses highlight the influence of institutional factors on NGO capacities.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study had two aims: (a) to assess, among households in the United States, the association between spending money on cigarettes and participation in charitable giving, and between spending money on cigarettes and amount spent on charitable giving, and (b) to assess whether the association between smoking and charitable giving is mediated by religiosity, social capital, cognitive aptitude, and happiness. To address these aims, we used data from Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey and Midlife in the United States Survey. The analyses revealed that households that spend money on cigarettes are less likely to participate in charitable giving. Furthermore, among households who do give to charity, smoking households give a lesser amount than others do. Religiosity, social capital, cognitive aptitude, and happiness do not appear to mediate the relationship between smoking and charitable giving.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. With the passage of a nationwide Charity Law in March 2016, Chinese nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) entered a new and unprecedented era of legal regulation, one that dramatically transformed the formal rules governing state–civil society relations. This article highlights problems experienced under earlier regulations and outlines the major features of the new law. Drawing on multiple focus groups and interviews with grassroots NGOs around China, the article highlights gaps between NGO leaders’ understandings of their work and several of the law’s key provisions, revealing civil society’s skepticism and pessimism about prospects for change. It concludes by considering the law’s likely implications for civil society development in China and lessons for other authoritarian states, suggesting that regulation in such regimes should be seen more properly as a tool of political control.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Benford’s Law asserts that the leading digit 1 appears more frequently than 9 in natural data. It has been widely used in forensic accounting and auditing to detect potential fraud, but its application to nonprofit data is limited. As the first academic study that applies Benford’s Law to U.S. nonprofit data (Form 990), we assess its usefulness in prioritizing suspicious filings for further investigation. We find close conformity with Benford’s Law for the whole sample, but at the individual organizational level, 34% of the organizations do not conform. Deviations from Benford’s law are smaller for organizations that are more professional, that report positive fundraising and administration expenses, and that face stronger funder oversight. We suggest improved statistical methods and experiment with a new measure of the extent of deviation from Benford’s Law that has promise as a more discriminating screening metric.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Utilizing a mixed-methods research design consisting of two consecutive phases, this study investigates older adults’ perceptions and understanding of social connectedness factors influencing late-life volunteering. In the first phase, quantitative data from the Belgian Ageing Studies project (N = 24,508, from 89 municipalities) was analyzed through regression modeling. In the second, qualitative phase, focus groups with older people were conducted in each of the six research locations, to elucidate and build on the quantitative results. The research findings indicate that formal connectedness is highly influential for both the potential to volunteer and actually doing so. Membership of an association and being a new resident are key determinants for volunteering in later life. Moreover, local policy also functions as an important bridge between long-term residents and new residents in terms of the social structure of the society and the extent to which people are integrated into the community.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. We examine a phenomenon which includes people who have had transformative experiences while abroad and traveling, and who have returned home to the United States and become philanthropic entrepreneurs: they start their own international nonprofit organizations. We set out to examine the motivations for giving to international causes through these nonprofits, called grassroots, international non-governmental organizations (GINGOs), which allow individuals to actualize their calling to serve distant places and causes. As an exploratory, qualitative inquiry, we build on recent survey and experiment data about motivations to international giving and donor choice. In particular, GINGO leaders as philanthropic entrepreneurs challenge two main deterrents related to international giving: trust and its influence on willingness to donate to international causes and the adage that “charity begins at home.” Our findings support suggestions in the literature that personal networks and word of mouth are important in donor choice and incentivizing giving to international causes.

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