Accountability in Nonprofit Organizations

Accountability, Performance Reporting, Comprehensive Audit: An Integrated Perspective, by Guy LeClerc, W. David Moynagh, Jean-Pierre Boisclair, and Hugh R. Hanson. Ottawa: CCAF-FCVI (Canadian Comprehensive Auditing Foundation- Fondation Canadienne pour la Verification Integral), 1996. 373 pp., $85.00 (Canadian, plus shipping) cloth. Managing for Accountability: Preserving the Public Trust in Public and Nonprofit Organizations, by Kevin P. Kearns. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996. 255 pp., $27.95 cloth.     

Collaboration Between Nonprofit and Business Sectors: A Framework to Guide Strategy Development for Nonprofit Organizations

Collaboration between nonprofit and business sectors is widely regarded as a value creation process that benefits society, business, and nonprofit organizations (NPOs). This process, however, has rarely been considered from a nonprofit perspective. In this paper, we discuss a new framework to assist NPOs in developing strategic collaborations with businesses. We argue that, by being strategically proactive rather than reactive to what businesses might offer, NPOs can increase the scale of their cross-sector collaborations and thus enhance their sustainability. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Evidence‐Based Management: Implications for Nonprofit Organizations

The article reviews evidence‐based management and its implications for practice and teaching. My focus is on strategic decision making in nonprofit organizations. Evidence‐based management is a process that includes framing the question, finding evidence, assuring accuracy, applicability, and actionability of evidence until the evidence is the best available.     

Collaboration Among Rural Nonprofit Organizations

Collaboration has received strong impetus in recent years. Service providers face greater expectations that they will share human and financial resources with other organizations, conduct joint planning, and devise other ways to break down organization barriers. This article analyzes collaborative practices among nonprofit organizations in rural southern Illinois and the Mississippi Delta. Environmental factors present in rural areas suggest that collaboration may be difficult to accomplish. Clients are scattered over a large geographic area, they are hard to contact because of transportation problems, community financial resources are limited, staff salaries are low, and some rural populations resist service offerings. Despite these difficulties, nonprofits in the two rural regions do engage in significant collaborations, and their leadership shows strong commitment to partnering with other organizations. Certain characteristics of the rural environment actually facilitate collaboration.     

Ethical Climate in Nonprofit Organizations: Propositions and Implications

The authors discuss a number of variables that may influence the perception of ethical climate in the nonprofit sector, including individual, organizational, and significant other (peers, coworkers, and superiors) variables. The basis of this discussion is the model developed by Agarwal and Malloy (1999) identifying a framework for nonprofits that is distinct from the for‐profit orientation. The authors provide ten propositions and discuss their implications.     

A Collaborator Profile for Executives of Nonprofit Organizations

This study involving ninety‐two nonprofit executive directors who engaged in separate interorganizational collaborations investigated the relationship between a select number of individual characteristics (personality and demographic) and perceived collaboration outcome (successful or unsuccessful). The collaborator profile that resulted suggests that directors who are predisposed to perceiving their respective collaborations as successful are extravert, feeling males who have high role ambiguity and low role boundary occupational stress. Given the increasing need for nonprofit organizations to collaborate with other organizations, it is important for nonprofit executives and their boards to be cognizant of some key factors that can lead to successful interorganizational collaborations.     

Hybrid Models for Social Change: Legitimacy Among Community-Based Nonprofit Organizations

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Community-based hybrid nonprofits, defined as organizations that combine social services with organizing or advocacy, play...     

Common Agency in Nonprofit Advocacy Organizations

Most theories of nonprofit organizations and nonprofit leadership recognize the multitude of stakeholders—including board members, donors and volunteers, funders, the media, and policy makers—that organizational leaders must contend with in doing their work. For nonprofits engaged in advocacy, demands from stakeholders may be even more challenging to meet. Although stakeholder theory recognizes the effect of various groups on an organization, it does not explain how leaders manage the preferences of their often‐competing stakeholders while they make choices for the organization. This study develops a common agency framework, evaluating the roles of three groups crucial to nonprofit advocacy organizations: the organization's board of directors, elected officials, and donors/members. The common agency framework is then illustrated with interviews with leaders of nonprofit advocacy organizations in California. Findings suggest that the leaders of these groups have a significant amount of discretion in guiding their organizations’ activities and operations.     

Stability and Change in Nonprofit Organizations: The Volunteer Contribution

This paper reports on a study of the microprocesses of stability and change in a nonprofit welfare organization in Australia. We position volunteering and voluntarism as core constitutive phenomena in and of nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector more generally, and examine volunteer agency in action. Developing a model drawn from neoinstitutional theory and adopting an ethnographic approach, the paper illustrates theoretically and empirically how volunteers create and revise institutional orders operative within organizations in ways hitherto poorly articulated and understood.     

Resolving Accountability Ambiguity in Nonprofit Organizations

Accountability is a much studied subject in the social sciences and is known for its complexity, context dependence, and ambiguity. By conducting a comprehensive literature review and analysis across nonprofit, public, and private sector literatures, this article identifies the causes of ambiguities present in many accountability frameworks and describes the trend toward understanding accountability as a constructed concept combining both instrumental and interpretive elements. The relationship between legitimacy and accountability is considered. The authors develop a holistic accountability framework that facilitates defining and implementing accountability in complex, multi-stakeholder environments, by providing a means to operationalize commonly encountered but ambiguous accountability goals through a social process of deliberative dialogue. The authors conclude by summarizing limitations of the approach and describing future research needed.     

Stakeholder Performance Measurement in Nonprofit Organizations

According to recent findings, nonprofit organizations should address the relationships of nonprofit service quality, satisfaction, loyalty, and organizational identification when planning and evaluating donor surveys. This article presents a donor satisfaction barometer that can be used to gain insights into the strength of these key relationships and thereby establish a basis for calculated relevant indices. With such indices, nonprofit organizations can compare stakeholder performance over time and benchmark themselves against other organizations. Data from 2,599 blood donors to one section of the German Red Cross, collected through the proposed donor satisfaction barometer, show that service quality drives satisfaction, and donor satisfaction and organizational identification both exert significant positive effects on donor loyalty. Therefore, nonprofit organizations should use a combined strategic approach that improves both donor satisfaction and organizational identification to increase donor loyalty. The successful application of the donor satisfaction barometer also suggests its value for other nonprofit industries and offers important insights for managers.     

Organizational Identity in Nonprofit Organizations: Strategic and Structural Implications

Organizational identity is what is central, distinctive, and enduring about an organization. This article argues that clarity and consensus about organizational identity are essential elements in setting successful long‐term strategy and making structural choices in a nonprofit organization. Four classes of nonprofit organization are examined here: grantmaking foundations, federated fundraising organizations, nonprofit academic centers, and social enterprises. In each case, alternative identities are described and the implications of each identity for organizational strategy and structure are analyzed. The article suggests that examination of identity should become an integral part of organizational development for nonprofit organizations and a subject for continued research.     

Challenges in Managing Nonprofit Organizations: A Research Overview

The topic of management and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) continues to fascinate scholars. This paper draws on varying theoretical perspectives to explore their respective contributions to our knowledge of NPOs. The two longstanding and contrasting disciplines of economics and sociology have contributed most, traditionally, to the study of NPOs. However, neither of these disciplines has resolved all the dilemmas associated with NPOs. The standard economic model does not apply well to the distinctive nonmarket situation of NPOs. The sociological perspectives offer interesting insight, but fail to develop plans of action for NPOs. However, both of these traditional perspectives are starting to be eclipsed by the focus on marketing research.     

Exploring Potential for Information Technology Innovation in Nonprofit Organizations

This article investigated user perceptions of innovative information technology. A qualitative analysis of information technology innovation award applications submitted by a variety of nonprofits was conducted to explore two research questions: (a) in what areas of organizational functioning can information technology innovations be implemented, and (b) what are the expected benefits associated with the implementation of those information technology innovations? The results showed that technological innovations can occur in administrative, service, and marketing areas; and that the applicants believed that those innovations have a potential to provide numerous positive benefits. Those benefits were associated with clients and programs, internal and external functioning, fundraising and financial aspects, and public image and relationships with stakeholders. Human service organizations proposed the highest numbers of IT innovations in the administrative and technological areas.