How Pervasive Are Abuses in Fundraising Among Nonprofits?

This article explores selected fundraising information for charitable nonprofits, asking whether widespread abuses might exist in this sector. After examining the pervasiveness of fundraising and its relation to mission, we show that a few nonprofits raise a majority of sector charitable revenues, and we present the ratio of funds raised to funds spent on fundraising by mission categories. We find that 72 percent of charitable nonprofits do not report direct fundraising expenditures, 5 percent of the active fundraising nonprofits obtain 90 percent of total funds raised, mission is related to a nonprofit's ability to raise funds, the median nonprofit spends about 9.6 percent of total raised funds for fundraising, and only one in five nonprofits hires a professional fundraiser. At least in terms of the measures used in this report, widespread abuses are not obvious.     

The competition state as a neomercantilist state: Understanding the restructuring of national and global telecommunications

The old etatist telecommunications order is presently experiencing radical changes, which seems to be deeper and broader than in any other sector. The paper examines the implications of these changes on the economic role of the state. It identifies regulation as an increasingly important mode of government intervention in the economy. The regulatory arsenal that states use to restructure global telecommunications includes new regulation, deregulation, and reregulation. The paper distinguishes two types of regulation aimed at the introduction of competition and the creation of markets: regulation-of-competition and regulation-for-competition. While the first type is a liberal form of intervention which aims to correct ‘market creation’ by the state. The critical place of regulation-for-competition in the governance of the new telecommunications regime underlines the rise of a ‘competition state,’ interpreted here as a refined and updated version of the neomercantilist state.     

Regulation of US Charitable Solicitations Since 1954

A major shift in the climate for the solicitation of charitable donations in the United States occurred in the second half of the twentieth century. Starting with legislation passed by the Legislatures of New York and Massachusetts in 1954 and eventually including 40 largely similar laws in force today, state governments grew to playing a predominant part in the regulation of appeals for public support for charitable activities. State regulators, voluntary oversight and advocacy groups, accounting standards-setting bodies, and the data-collection activities of the Internal Revenue Service all influenced the development of the body of regulations which now shape the process of seeking support for nonprofits?? work. This article summarizes the effect of earlier innovations in the field of fundraising and then examines the interplay of public and private actors in the course of the creation of the present regulatory climate.     

Fundraising encroachment on public relations: A clear and present danger to effective trustee leadership

When fundraising encroachment occurs, strategic publics who can affect a charitable organization's success and survival are rarely brought to the attention of trustees because public relations practitioners are denied access to these leaders, and the manager who does have access—the fundraiser—is trained and rewarded to concentrate on donor publics. A national survey documents fundraising encroachment in five of the six major types of charitable organizations. Although only 23 percent of the respondents (N = 175) reported structural encroachment, 40 percent agreed that the senior fundraisers in their organizations had more say in policy decisions than the senior public relations officers. Small but significant correlations were found between encroachment and the extent to which the public relations department has the knowledge and expertise to practice two-way models of public relations and communications support.     

The regulatory breadth index: A new tool for the measurement and comparison of state-level charity regulation in the United States

The bulk of charity regulation in the United States occurs at the state level, yet state-level charity regulation remains relatively under-researched within nonprofit scholarship, particularly from a comparative perspective. The complexity and variation in statutory regulation, coupled with the large volume of legal research required to study state-level charity regulation systematically, has impeded scholarly progress toward a better understanding of the US charitable sector. We address this problem by deriving a state-level charity regulatory breadth index (RBI) that will enable nonprofit researchers to contextualize state-level charity research within a broader framework and to incorporate state-level regulation into analyses across states. Policymakers can also benefit from the ability to benchmark their regulatory regimes against their peers.     

New governance of labour rights: the perspective of Cambodian garment workers’ struggles

Globalization has implied the transfer of industrial work to countries of the Global South, where labour rights are seldom effectively protected by legal frameworks. New forms of governance that go beyond state-centred legal regulation are presented as an alternative to fill in ‘governance gaps’. This paper analyses ‘new governance’ from the perspective of Cambodian garment workers and labour movements’ struggles. Drawing on the literature on governance and private regulation and research data from Cambodia, it argues that a technocratic approach makes governance initiatives ignore the economic conflict between labour and capital but also the possible political conflict between labour and government. By ignoring trade union rights, power-blind initiatives might end up weakening both the labour movement and democratic accountability, instead of complementing state’s regulatory roles. This might serve the overlapping interests of the powerful actors both in Cambodia and internationally.     

Shining Light on Charities or Looking in the Wrong Place? Regulation-by-Transparency in Canada

The nature of charity reporting and transparency is changing significantly; while the longstanding focus on financial reporting remains, there is much greater emphasis on illuminating governance systems and impacts. Regulatory regimes are becoming more polycentric with the expansion of third party watchdogs and emergence of new self-regulatory bodies. With more open access to data, transparency has become an independent force in these regimes. The article outlines a conceptual model of charity regulatory regimes and applies this to analyze recent developments of regulation-by-transparency in Canada. Although the intent of encouraging greater transparency is seldom questioned, this Canadian case study demonstrates how transparency can become politicized, damaging the relationship between the regulator and the charitable sector. In addition, the open data movement means that charities now operate in a world in which neither they nor state regulators control access and use of information.     

Individual Preferences Over Development Projects: Evidence from Microlending on Kiva

Peer-to-peer microfinance connects philanthropic citizens with poor entrepreneurs in the developing world, offering new ways to channel charitable contributions. Although the literature suggests that donors?? perceptions of effectiveness affect charitable giving, very little is known about what types of projects individuals perceive as more effective. Using data from Kiva.org, this article presents evidence on the relative popularity of competing development projects. We present estimates of the impact of publicly visible project characteristics on funding speed. Assuming that Kiva lenders are motivated by poverty alleviation, the results shed light on individual philanthropists?? perception of project effectiveness. Knowing this can help practitioners design fundraising strategies more effectively, especially for projects that are inherently less popular.     

Rethinking the changing structures of rural local government – State power,rural politics and local political strategies?

There is a notable absence in contemporary rural studies – of both a theoretical and empirical nature – concerning the changing nature of rural local government. Despite the scale and significance of successive rounds of local government reorganisation in the UK, very little has been written on this topic from a rural perspective. Instead research on local political change has tended to concentrate on local governance and local partnerships – on the extra-governmental aspects of the governance system – rather than on local government itself. In contrast, this paper draws upon strategic-relational state theory to explore the changing structures and institutions of rural local government, and analyse how these can be related to the changing state strategies of those groups which are politically powerful in rural areas. In this respect, the paper draws on current and previous rounds of local government reorganisation to illustrate how new objects of governance, new state strategies and new hegemonic projects are emerging as a consequence of such restructuring processes.     

Explaining Trust in Canadian Charities: The Influence of Public Perceptions of Accountability,Transparency, Familiarity and Institutional Trust

Public trust of nonprofits can augment social benefits of the nonprofit sector by enhancing engagement of the general population in the sector. This study analyzed cross sectional data collected from a random sample of Canadians (n?=?3853) to test the effects of respondents’ perceptions of financial accountability, transparency, and familiarity of charitable nonprofits, along with the effects of trust in key institutions on their general trust in charitable nonprofits. Results show that each factor (except for trust in government institutions) has a significant effect on the level of trust respondents had in charitable nonprofits. The study helps advance our understanding of what contributes to trust in charitable nonprofits among Canadians and offers suggestions on how nonprofits can garner greater trust with the population.

     

The effect of recommended contributions in the voluntary provision of public goods

Recommended contributions are often observed in fundraising campaigns for charitable and other public goods. We present an experiment investigating the impact of recommended contributions in a voluntary threshold public goods process. We find that when valuations for the public good are heterogeneous, recommended contributions significantly increase the likelihood of efficient provision, although when valuations are homogeneous, the effect of recommendations is less compelling. This article represents a first step in understanding recommended contributions and other nonbinding, cheap-talk announcements in public goods provision and charitable contributions.     

Does Fundraising Professionalization Pay?

Although fundraising organizations in the third sector have gone through a progressive professionalization process, it remains unclear whether this development has led to any financial benefits. This article focuses on the question of whether or not it pays off for fundraising organizations to invest in professionalization. The data for this study come from 165 organizations representing 45 percent of the Swiss fundraising market. We first propose the term “organizational fundraising capability” as a new construct for measuring the degree of professionalization and rationalization in fundraising management. We then analyze its relationship to overall net revenue from donations as well as the growth of net revenue from donations. Our analysis indicates that, in addition to organizational size measured by total revenue, revenue share from donations, and expansion strategy, fundraising capability makes an important contribution to explaining both an institution's net revenue from fundraising and the level of increase in net donations. The consequences for the development of professionalization and rationalization in fundraising are discussed.     

What Accounts for the Variations in Nonprofit Growth? A Cross-National Panel Study

Previous studies of nonprofit growth have lamented the lack of cross-national longitudinal data measuring the size of the nonprofit sector across countries, which has made it difficult to assess the current state of knowledge about the nonprofit sector beyond national boundaries. Recent progress in measuring nonprofit growth using panel studies or cross-national data has compensated for the limitations of the existing research, but even the recent data are either country specific or cross sectional in nature. This study takes on the challenge of supplementing the current research by measuring nonprofit growth using internationally comparable longitudinal data. Specifically, this study focuses on whether certain key indicators of the overall state of the economy can be used to predict and explain the size of nonprofit sectors cross-nationally. The overall state of the economy has considerable relevance for nonprofit growth, as it influences the levels of government funding and private philanthropy that benefit the nonprofit sector. The results indicate that the existing theories about the nonprofit sector account for variations in nonprofit growth but are limited in their explanations of the underlying dynamics of such variations beyond national boundaries. Social origins theory is a useful addition that helps to explain cross-national variations in nonprofit growth. Importantly, the interplay among the government, private philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector is dynamic, and its effect on economic indicators varies across nonprofit regime types when sociodemographic variables are controlled.     

Legitimacy of rural local government in the new governance environment

Since the early 1990s, the legitimacy of local government has been on the margins of debates about the regulation and governance of contemporary capitalism and their scalar forms. Yet, for those engaged in the day-to-day practice of local government in the governance environment, the question of how to maintain legitimacy is of central importance. This paper, which reports on the findings of a study of two rural districts in the South Island of New Zealand and Victoria, Australia, seeks to explore the interface between theory and practice of local government in the governance environment. Recent theorising about the implications of governance for the legitimacy of territorial local authorities is outlined, and recurring legitimacy-related themes in local governments’ engagement with governance are employed to construct a framework for analysing empirical cases. A brief (contextual) picture is drawn of the two rural cases, and the framework is employed to analyse them. Finally, the efficacy of this approach to the study of local government legitimacy, and the significance of the case study findings for the debate about the role of local representative government, are reflected upon.     

‘Shopping for Change’: <Emphasis Type="Italic">World Vision Canada</Emphasis> and Consumption-Oriented Philanthropy in the Age of Philanthrocapitalism

According to Charity Intelligence Canada, in 2014, at least 21 Canadian non-profits published a gift catalogue featuring a range of “products”^a that donors could “purchase” for people in need. These charity gift catalogues, along with other shopping-inspired fundraising initiatives, represent a significant shift in the philanthropic arena towards philanthrocapitalism. Using two World Vision Canada campaigns as exemplars, this article offers a critical analysis of what the author calls “consumption-oriented philanthropy”^b—a class of charitable giving that is heavily guided by market principles without involving a consumer product. Unlike purchase-triggered donation campaigns (in which a charitable donation is made when a consumer product is purchased), consumption-oriented philanthropy does not require the purchase of a for-profit commodity; instead, consumption-oriented philanthropy reformulates aid recipients or charitable aid itself into symbolic commodities. By re-framing charitable aid as a pseudo-shopping experience, however, consumption-oriented philanthropy ushers in an entirely different set of values, expectations, and logic that shapes the way in which donors understand and engage in philanthropic giving.     

Government regulation of gambling advertising: Replacing vice prevention with consumer protection

From 1895 to 1975, federal law forbade gambling advertising by use of the mail, interstate commerce, and the broadcast media. Congress exempted state lotteries in 1975 and charitable gambling (including casino games) in 1988. However, the Supreme Court requires a significant government interest, directly applied and narrowly tailored, in order to justify a commercial speech regulation. The exemptions for private charity casino games has arguably destroyed any constitutionally defensible government interest in restricting for-profit casinos. Casinos in new gambling jurisdictions (such as Iowa or Illinois) will probably push the hardest for an exemption for all legal gambling, as they have the most to gain from the freedom to advertise. Federal regulation of gambling advertising will fall to the Federal Trade Commission under prohibitions against unfair or deceptive trade practices. But as State regulations are not well developed even in states that permit casino gambling, there is a pressing need for new research to review state laws regulating gambling advertising and to propose a model statute.     

Governing Migrant Workers at a Distance: Managing the Temporary Status of Guestworkers in Taiwan

This paper explores how a liberal democratic state keeps migrant workers in temporary status by preventing their permanent settlement. Using Taiwan’s guestworker policy as an example, we argue that through expertise discourses and strategies of “governance at a distance” involving private sector, the Taiwan government has formulated policies and implemented measures that effectively kept guestworkers in temporary status. Analyzing Taiwan’s guestworker policy helps us to understand how the state and its collaborators work together to enhance the control capacity over migrants, while at the same time, enabling the state to keep its liberal pretense.     

Between technocracy and democracy: An experimental approach to certification of food products by Japanese consumer cooperative women

Voluntary food certification systems have emerged as a prominent mechanism of food governance in recent years. However, critics have exposed certifications’ inability to secure independence, quality, consumer trust, and costs. Recent criticism is even more pointed in that some theorists have critiqued “alternative” systems such as Fair Trade as neoliberal window-dressing. What is curious about this emerging literature is how little has been said about the role of citizens. Although most of the certification literature has assumed that food certification resides in the exclusive realm of “experts” and that technical sophistication is equated with improvement, I argue that democratization is possible and desirable. This paper draws on a case study of a Japanese consumer cooperative which has conducted a laywomen's food certification system for past ten years. By proposing at least two parameters of evaluation of food certification—redistributive effect and the degree of democratization, the paper expands the imaginary of “politics of the possible” in food governance while acknowledging tension of gendered participation.     

The potential of Web sites as a relationship building tool for charitable fundraising NPOs

The Internet and especially the new challenges within Web 2.0 provide organizations with the possibility of encouraging two-way communication and engaging publics in dialogue. Charitable fundraising nonprofit organizations (NPOs) can particularly benefit from the Web's relationship building potential. This study aims to explore the potential of Web sites as an online-communication tool of Swiss NPOs. Via content analysis, the Web sites of 134 Swiss charitable fundraising NPOs were examined in order to point out how those organizations are using the Web to create dialogic relationships with their most important stakeholder groups, which are potential donors and the media. Results indicate that the potential of the Internet for dialogic communication is not used efficiently by most NPOs. Nevertheless, NPOs seem to be acknowledging the importance of engaging publics in dialogue, as most of them replied to information requests from potential donors and the media.¹     

Social participation and charitable giving: A multivariate analysis

Despite an abundance of survey data on charitable giving, researchers have not analysed these data asking the kinds of theoretical questions and employing the kinds of multivariate statistical techniques that would advance our understanding of the social processes leading to charitable behaviour. This article reports the authors' first findings from their continuing efforts to develop and test such a multivariate causal model of the social, demographic, economic and motivational determinants of individual charitable giving. The first section outlines ouridentification theory of charitable giving. In the second section we discuss the data and how we operationalise our variables. The third section examines whether there is broad quantitative support for major tenets of the model developed if applied at the household level. In the fourth section we enquire about which factors are most strongly related to giving behaviour. We conclude with a discussion about the centrality of communities of participation for inducing charitable giving and about the practical implications for fundraising. An earlier version of this article was prepared for presentation at the annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, Berkeley, October 1994. The authors are grateful to the T. B. Murphy Charitable Trust, the Lilly Endowment and the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy for their support of this research. We are also grateful to Virginia A. Hodgkinson and Stephen M. Noga for providing data from theSurvey of Giving and Volunteering and for sharing their expertise. Finally, we wish to thank the Editor ofVoluntas and three anonymous reviewers for their careful and constructive suggestions.