Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Communities, intended as self-organized informal groups, are much less structured than nonprofit organizations typically considered by Cross-Sector Social Partnership (CSSP) studies. Building on the empirical investigation of a real CSSP, this article offers an in-depth analysis of the ambivalent dynamics implied by partnership with such communities. Our…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Volunteering can be understood as a human-made, renewable resource that can be grown and recycled, and whose continuation and volume of flow can be influenced by human beings positively as well as negatively. We extend the metaphor and break down the monolithic concept into three categories: traditional…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The contested concept of social entrepreneurship has gained particular prominence in academic literature over the last few decades. To explore how patterns of understandings relating to social entrepreneurship have emerged and shifted over time, we undertook a critical historical review focusing on the most highly cited social…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article proposes a research program with two goals: (a) to support nonprofit leaders to productively engage evaluation and (b) to advance a meso-level theory of nonprofit evaluation that recognizes the diverse ways nonprofits contribute to social change. Such a research program is timely, as evaluation becomes…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The study of nonprofit advocacy has evolved significantly over the past two decades, yet gaps still remain in our understanding of the processes and roles of nonprofit organizations in policymaking and policy change. In part, these gaps may be exacerbated by limitations in the methodologies and research…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In 2017, about 30% of all U.S. adults volunteered for a total of 6.9 billion hours. This raises the question, why do so many people volunteer? Extant research has produced highly variable estimates of the effect sizes of various motivating factors, and there has been little to…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study analyzes the effect of opportunity costs on the decision to volunteer, the extent of volunteering, and how opportunity costs are related to competing volunteering activities. Our results reveal that opportunity costs operationalized as net wage per hour had the predicted negative effect on the extent…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. By offering low-cost tools of communication and coordination, social media platforms such as Facebook may constitute a substitute for coordination by means of hierarchical organization. Social media may disrupt, appearing as a “weapon of the weak,” a relationship that has traditionally linked membership to resources and influence.…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. High-profile charity scandals have always represented a threat to the nonprofit sector, which relies on public trust and funding to operate. We systematically review 30 years of empirical research on scandals involving nonprofits and present both quantitative and qualitative syntheses of the 71 articles identified. Informed by…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Charitable organizations have embraced virtual reality (VR); however, scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness for social good often uses poor experimental methodology and finds inconsistent results. We conducted a rigorous randomized control trial testing whether 360° video virtual reality increases empathy and charitable donations. Participants (N = 155)…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. We propose a conceptual model of the political activities of nonprofits that qualify for exemption under subsections of the Internal Revenue Code other than 501(c)(3), including social welfare organizations, civic leagues, social clubs, and so on, which considers three categories of explanatory factors: organizational capacity, financial strategy,…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Many nonprofit organizations operate under immense financial pressure. Revenue volatility is a common target for managers to minimize under the assumption that maintaining consistent revenue enhances the viability of the organization while high revenue volatility may disrupt planning. However, the relationship between revenue volatility and the viability…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article presents a summary review of the voluntary sector literature on third sector organizations (TSOs) and climate change. As governments around the world fail to respond adequately to the climate crisis, TSOs are called upon to work with governments, advocate for policy change, and support communities.…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Social media is an important tool for nonprofit public policy advocacy. To help nonprofits effectively utilize social media in advocacy efforts, this study proposes a measurement framework of social media social capital based on social networks. Specifically, in this study, we examine the relationships between social media…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article studies the impact of exogenous shocks on nonprofit operations by assessing the effect of 9/11 on donations to Muslim American nonprofits. The first narrative promoted by civil rights groups and some Islamic charities argues that donations to Islamic charities have declined. Individuals are afraid of…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. I examine how volunteering dynamics changed in the United Kingdom during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic relying on data from the “Understanding Society” survey. Descriptive analyses and linear probability models yield three main findings: First, the share of volunteers (for all causes) dropped at least by…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This research note introduces nonprofit researchers accustomed to the U.S. Form 990 to the Canadian data captured on the T3010 financial form that will soon be available to researchers on a broad scale. Similar to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In celebration of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly’s 50th anniversary, we present a bibliometric analysis of nonprofit research published between 1999 and 2019, within and outside of three core nonprofit journals—NVSQ, NML, and Voluntas. We seek to understand which journals, across scientific domains and social science disciplines,…

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Despite an increasing number of executives who transition from for-profit to not-for-profit organizations, our understanding of how commercially imprinted managers navigate the new setting remains limited. We collected data in the form of biographical interviews and observations with managers who had previously held a leading position in…