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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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Nonprofits are increasingly involved in collaborative governance mechanisms, on the premise that their proximity to end users and better understanding of the local contexts can lead to better policy outcomes. Although government–nonprofit relations have been theorized and explored by several studies, few studies have examined specifically collaborative governance, instead focusing on other phases of policy development or service delivery. In this article, we present a realist evaluation of data gathered from in-depth semi-structured interviews (N = 41) and four focus groups with stakeholders involved in collaborative governance arrangements within “Strategic Public Social Partnerships” in Scotland. Our findings indicate that collaborative governance processes involving nonprofits can potentially lead to improved services through mechanisms such as the development of trust and the establishment of new learning dynamics, and when knowledgeable leadership and mutuality drive collaborations. However, this is only true if the long-term sustainability of these processes translates into the mainstreaming of both the resulting services and their underlying collaborative principles.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Demographic shifts, economic restructuring, online-giving platforms, and growing competition threaten traditional models of community philanthropy. Responding to these pressures, philanthropy thought leaders have supported “a new way forward” for community foundations—community leadership. However, change is difficult, and little research examines organizational processes of moving toward community leadership. This study uses a simultaneous qualitative mixed methods design to describe organizational paths to community leadership while considering field-level aspiration toward such change. To confirm previous research, we examine community foundation mission descriptions from 2011 to 2016, finding limited evidence that the field is aspiring toward the community leadership model. Using interviews with leaders of organizations that have begun to shift toward community leadership, we unpack how such transformation occurs. We find that change, even amid field-level pressures, unfolds through localized improvisation and bricolage as community foundations adapt their work to demands in their community.

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Our contribution lies in exploring loci and reach of leadership diversity’s influence on proximal and distal performance outcomes to understand how and where these can be mobilized. Our moderated-mediation modeling decomposes the direct, indirect, and interaction effects of demographic diversity among three types of focal actors in governance—Boards (gender-, age-, and ethno-racial variety), Board Chairs (gender and ethno-racial demography), Chief Executives (gender and ethno-racial demography)—on five factors reflecting functional and social dimensions of Board Performance and two dimensions of Organizational Performance. We demonstrate that the Board composition affects proximal board performance outcomes, whereas CEO demography is more related to distal organizational performance outcomes. Board Chairs, a less-examined aspect of nonprofit governing, stand out as bridging both proximal and distal outcomes, both directly and through their interactions with Board diversity and CEO demography.

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