Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Nonprofits must navigate a unique tension—meeting the financial demands of the market while pursuing a social mission. As a result, market and mission concerns are often framed in a competitive, dualistic relationship. However, organizational communication scholars argue that the mission-market tension is a natural, even ontologically defining feature of nonprofits. Thus, rather than seek to resolve these tensions, scholars should examine how organizational members construct the market-mission relationship, as these understandings are essential to strategically navigating market-mission concerns. This study examines how organizational members construct the market-mission relationship at 18 organizations that serve survivors of commercial sexual exploitation, 15 of which operate social enterprises. The findings indicate that organizations frame “the market is the mission but much more,” positioning mission and market in a synergistic relationship that births creative possibility and organizational third space. This article charts the local-level tensions organizational members experience, identifying how they are discursively framed and pragmatically navigated.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article focuses on collective engagement through voluntary organizations to advance a theoretical understanding of the determinants of varying patterns of co-production, and we conduct an empirical investigation of how these determinants shape local-level co-productive relationships in Norwegian municipalities. We use a policy fields approach in which we compare four policy areas that each constitute an institutional field. The study uses a qualitative design, with data from 89 interviews in 12 municipalities. We find strong systematic differences between the fields, suggesting that the institutional space for local co-production is structured by national welfare policies and public management practices. We also identify feedback processes in co-production between the design and implementation stages of the policy process. We conclude that, unlike the often-prescriptive embrace of co-production in the literature and among policymakers, co-production is a more suitable organizational form in some service areas than others, depending on the institutional context.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. How do nonprofits advocate and shape climate conversations on Twitter? We answer this question by combining computational analyses with thick descriptions of discursive data to analyze message diffusion on Twitter. We first map a temporal message similarity network comprising 298,073 unique tweets sent by climate action and obstruction nonprofits. We then identify four leading nonprofits and trace their message similarity to 2,479 accounts over 2 weeks. Our results suggest that while climate obstruction nonprofits might not be frequent tweeters, their voices are highly reciprocal in the Twitterverse. We also find that messages of either side are most echoed by the public rather than elite audiences. Although diffusion to policymakers is almost absent, we uncover high semantic similarities between messages from climate obstruction nonprofits and bot-like accounts. Our analyses contribute to new theoretical and empirical insights into the roles of nonprofit conversation leaders and their potential message diffusion in climate discourse.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The voluntary and civil society sector plays important roles in climate policy, mitigation and adaptation, especially given the pervasive government and market failures in this policy domain. Does the quality and quantity of scholarship published in nonprofit-focused journals reflect the topic’s importance? This article reviews voluntary sector scholarship on climate issues and serves to introduce Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly’s first organized collection of research on the voluntary sector and climate change. We begin by summarizing and commenting on the findings of a modified systematic literature review of past research on this subject. We then introduce the other five articles published in this symposium, place them in the context of past literature, and discuss their potential contributions to helping researchers expand the conversation and the knowledge on this topic in future work. Finally, we outline ideas and issues for future research.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Increasing online advocacy by donors has important implications for nonprofit organizations (NPOs). Through a lens of self-disclosure theory, this current research combines data across three quantitative cross-sectional surveys of millennial Australian donors who donate blood, time, and/or money to better understand how NPOs can encourage existing donors to engage in greater online advocacy. Findings demonstrate (a) the importance of social norms and psychological involvement in online advocacy decisions, (b) that “firm-generated” marketing effectiveness can vary by the content provided by NPOs, and (c) that not all donation types are equal when encouraging donors to be advocates. The work contributes by broadening the scope of existing models of online brand advocacy to a donation context by examining “firm-generated user-shared” content and millennials’ social media use for prosocial behaviors.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Theories of density dependence emphasize the role of competition and legitimation in organizational life. However, agglomerative configurations and ecological processes vary substantially over space, resulting in heterogeneous sub-populations which organizations select into by choosing locations. Using geostatistical data constructed from form-990 submissions and the American Community Survey, this article studies the role of location and density in the operations of nonprofits using generalized additive models. After controlling for organizational and neighborhood features, the results show substantial variation in the effect of location on total and contributed revenue. Nonprofit density is positively associated with the location effects across a range of distances. The results suggest organizations benefit greatly from locating in high-density regions and may be most sensitive to variation in density in their immediate proximity. The study emphasizes location dependence through the importance of location and the intra-county distribution of nonprofits.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article investigates the factors that enable cooperation between the state and faith-based organizations (FBOs) in public service implementation. Looking at the Brazilian context, the research explores the consequences of hybridization processes for FBOs and state organizations, as well as for public services. The article analyzes the case of therapeutic communities, FBOs that provide services for drug and alcohol users. Data were collected through documents and 67 interviews with different actors involved in the service implementation. The findings contribute to the literatures on FBOs, hybridization, and institutional fit, showing that the interactions between state organizations and FBOs lead to the inclusion of values and cognitive frameworks for both, generating a mutual constitution between them. The findings show how different types of institutional fit enable cooperation throughout different forms of mediation, which also affect the organizations involved in the cooperation.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. As competition over grant funding increases, nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are increasingly likely to enter into contracts with government agencies to ensure funding stability and accomplish organizational goals. Public agencies seek to reduce the possibility of contractor performance problems. Unlike profit-seeking firms that may need constant monitoring, NPOs could be more likely to serve as stewards of public resources, delivering services consistent with shared goals. However, few empirical studies have assessed the comparative performance of private and nonprofit contractors to determine whether there are meaningful differences in practice. This study analyzes nearly 25,000 U.S. federal definitive contracts that concluded between 2005 and 2015. Using predictive statistical analyses, findings indicate that nonprofits deliver more complex work than their for-profit counterparts, are less likely to be terminated early, do not require additional contract modifications, and are treated similarly to other vendors. Taken together, the results suggest that there are mutual benefits when governments and nonprofits engage in contracts.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article draws on literature on nonprofit resilience to hazards to explore the impact of federal Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans on nonprofits’ staffing, services, and financial health during the COVID-19 pandemic’s first year. Through propensity score matching with survey data collected in spring 2020 and winter 2021 from the New Orleans area, linked to publicly available PPP data, nonprofits that did and did not receive a PPP loan were matched on covariates representing critical resilience capacities pre-pandemic, allowing calculation of effect sizes for short-term outcomes. Results suggest that PPP tentatively supported nonprofit liquidity in the form of reserves, but had at best mixed results in promoting service maintenance, and did not support hiring or staff retention in excess of the non-treatment group. Despite the small sample size, these preliminary findings inform how PPP may have supported short-term sustainability and help guide future federal policy to support nonprofits during crises.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Although COVID-19-related physical distancing has had large economic consequences, the impact on volunteerism is unclear. Using volunteer position postings data from Canada’s largest volunteer center (Volunteer Toronto) from February 3, 2020, to January 4, 2021, we evaluated the impact of different levels of physical distancing on average views, total views, and total number of posts. There was about a 50% decrease in the total number of posts that was sustained throughout the pandemic. Although a more restrictive physical distancing policy was generally associated with fewer views, there was an initial increase in views during the first lockdown where total views were elevated for the first 4 months of the pandemic. This was driven by interest in COVID-19-related and remote work postings. This highlights the community of volunteers may be quite flexible in terms of adapting to new ways of volunteering, but substantial challenges remain for the continued operations of many non-profit organizations.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Millions of nonprofits compete for a share of the billions of dollars donated to charity each year. Yet how donors select which charities to support remains relatively understudied. Social norms influence whether people give to charity at all, but no research has yet considered whether norms also communicate information about which causes group members typically support. To address this important question, we surveyed 1,735 people from 117 countries to understand whether they identified normative causes typically supported by their social groups. We found different normative giving profiles for men, women, older people, younger people, conservatives, progressives, religious, and nonreligious people, with varying degrees of consensus within each social group. Results demonstrate empirically—and for the first time—that social identities contain normative content about which charitable causes group members typically support. Some causes were relatively universally approved of or avoided. Results can inform nonprofit fundraising strategy around segmentation and targeting.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study examines how gender diversity on nonprofit boards relates to chief executive officer (CEO) compensation using data of 1,835 501(c)(3) organizations with the GuideStar Platinum Seal of Transparency. The analysis reveals a positive association between women’s representation on a governing board and female CEO compensation until women’s proportion reaches 82%. By contrast, there is a negative relationship between women’s representation on boards and male CEO compensation. Overall, the findings suggest that board gender diversity has distinctive implications for CEO compensation depending on CEO gender and that having more women on governing boards contributes to closing the gender pay gap for nonprofit executives. These findings can be applied to other dimensions of diversity, including racial and ethnic diversity.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Volume 52, Issue 1_suppl, Page 12S-28S, April 2023.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Existing studies often use the association between sector sizes to test the supplementary and complementary models of government–nonprofit relations, assuming that one mode of government–nonprofit relations dominates a policy subsector. We challenge this assumption and propose that the relationship between nonprofit sector size and the breadth of local government policy actions depends on their level of collaboration. Situated in the context of urban climate governance and drawing information from a national survey of U.S. local government climate actions, we test this modified model and find a statistically significant moderation effect of collaboration. However, contrary to our proposed hypotheses, our findings suggest that a positive association between the number of environmental nonprofits and governmental climate actions exists when the level of government–nonprofit collaboration is low to moderate. We posit that the adversarial lens of government–nonprofit relations and the cost of collaboration are key to understanding these surprising findings.

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