Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Nurturing relationships with major donors is a priority for nonprofits, and “relationship fundraising” is the dominant paradigm. This grounded theory study addressed practical needs and a dearth of research by analyzing how fundraisers develop relationships. In a first-of-its-kind study, we interviewed 20 pairs of higher education fundraisers…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Representative bureaucracy theory posits that the passive representation of women in leadership positions will lead to active representation of the concerns of women in general. This article attempts to identify whether this theory plays out on boards of nonprofit funding organizations, specifically United Ways across the United…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Volume 50, Issue 5, Page 913-918, October 2021.    Goto full post >>

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Sexual harassment has garnered renewed attention with a wave of allegations against high profile men, including nonprofit executives. Given its legal, organizational, and ethical implications for nonprofit organizations and the sector, it is imperative that nonprofits take steps to prevent sexual harassment. Because there is limited research…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Recent literature has highlighted the central role that donor identity, the perception of oneself as a giving person, plays in fundraising. In this, nonprofit organizations develop strategies to encourage a generous self-perception among potential donors and volunteers to elicit donations. However, existing literature has not yet examined…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The field of nonprofit studies often assumes that efforts of actors in the nonprofit landscape are beneficial, especially when considering nonprofit human service organizations. However, there are both theoretical and empirical reasons for scholars to adopt a more critical lens when examining these organizations. Taking nonprofit human…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Volunteer managers identify challenging tasks, such as volunteer buy-in, retention, and role matching. Successful management of these tasks is influenced by how volunteers anticipate and perceive their volunteer experience. Volunteers receive and interpret messages about the drivers, rules, and expectations of giving one’s time and expertise from…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This study utilizes structuration theory to reveal how volunteer coaches in an all-female youth sport program describe barriers and agency to their organizational mission of athlete empowerment. The dataset in this ethnographic case study comes from volunteer coaching experiences within two youth sport teams. Ethnographic data included…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article argues that informal volunteering (the unstructured giving of one’s time to help friends, neighbors, or community) has been ignored or understudied within research and policy. With data frequently showing higher rates of informal volunteering among women, people of color, working-class communities, and other often discriminated…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This experiment examined the effects of fundraising message characteristics on donation intentions through a simulated social media campaign. A 2 (abstract vs. concrete message) × 2 (gain vs. loss framing) between-subjects experiment (n = 213) revealed that a message with detailed fundraising outcomes elicited a greater intention…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. This article critically examines academic scholarship in the field of nonprofit studies that pertains to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people and issues. We introduce the key tenets of queer theory, a critical theory which encourages questioning social constructs, to nonprofit studies as a lens…

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Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The aim of this article is to understand how the scholarship of the nonprofit sector shifted after almost half a century (1972–2019) of publication in the field’s premier journal, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. Unlike previous attempts to understand the field’s scholarly evolution, we did not rely…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The nonprofit sector may suffer financially from inconsistency in regulations and polices surrounding internal control implementation. To address this issue, our study explores how perceived internal control strength differs between nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Furthermore, we examine three components of the Committee of Sponsoring Organization framework to…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In this research note, we call attention to human milk donation being essentially omitted from the philanthropy literature and bodily gifting research. We focus here on human milk donations for infant feeding through nonprofit milk banks. We argue that its omission is due to two main factors:…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The nonprofit organizational life cycle literature has traditionally focused on the entry and exit processes; the intermediate organizational life stages between these bookends have received less attention. Almost half of all nonprofits at any given time operate in an early life stage with less than US$100,000 in…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. In this article, we outline the determinants of informal charitable giving and the link between giving and inequality. Arguing that inequality encompasses at least two competing effects—distrust and observed need for donations—we use a novel proxy to separate out the effect of the latter from the former…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. Empirical research on donor behavior infers from donations being negatively related to overhead ratios (or indicators based on these ratios) that donors give more to more “efficient” organizations. This relation is proved to be at least partly driven by a purely mechanical link between donations and overhead…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. The interplay between formal organizing structures and the informal social networks of employees and organizations furthers the resilience of nonprofit organizations that serve the community. This case study draws on qualitative multi-pronged data collected in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey from two faith networks of social welfare…

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Ahead of Print. A large number of empirical studies have discussed the revenue diversification strategy for nonprofits, but little attention has been paid to the components of revenue portfolios, even though each revenue source flows into a nonprofit with its own characteristics. Drawing on Young’s benefits theory, this study tests…