Balancing Mission and Market Aims

Resource Acquisition

A nonprofit organization’s resources and capacities predicate its ability to deliver on its mission. The organization’s perception of its identity and the role(s) it plays in its community can affect resource acquisition, which in turn affects, and is affected by, its capacities. My approach embraces this complexity and the inherent interdependence of these factors. To start, I focus on the acquisition of financial resources. I developed a theoretical framework of revenue embeddedness to assess and classify individual earned revenue streams based on the connections between mission-driven programmatic activities and market-based revenue-generating activities. This classification tool serves as a conceptual innovation that allows scholars to determine the impact of different types of revenue on overall financial resources and on service delivery. I then worked with Matthew Galasso (my former graduate research assistant who is now a PhD student at Michigan State University) to qualitatively explore how and why pursuing earned revenue can affect organizational identity.

One question often raised about earned revenue is its effect(s) on donations: does earned revenue crowd in (act as a complement to) donations, or does it crowd out (become a substitute for) donations? Using data from over 12,000 arts organizations, I find that the type of earned revenue determines its effect: earned revenue activities offering new products or services to existing donors tend to complement donations, while earned revenue resulting from activities tangentially related to mission may ultimately end up substituting for donations.

Dr. Heng Qu and I use survey experiments to explore donor aversion to overhead (perceive to be non-programmatic spending), and responsiveness to different framing. We find donors are responsive to framing that presents overhead as building long-term organizational capacity, as well as to framing that explains these costs without using the actual word overhead.

Organizational Identity

My work with Dr. Eckerd expands our understanding of organizational identity among nonprofits, and loops back to my resource acquisition research. Organizational sensemaking has been relatively widely studied, but organizational sensegiving has been a lesser focus. Our work focuses specifically on nonprofit organizations where resource providers are not necessarily the target market or recipients of the organization’s programs. We used factor analysis to identify three sensegiving strategies used by nonprofits. We then examined the relationship between these strategies and different types of revenue, finding evidence that different sensegiving strategies are associated with different income streams. In addition to the theoretical contributions, this work has practical implications for how nonprofit organizations can use their identities to acquire resources.

Broader nonprofit trends

My research into sector and cross-sector trends looks back at organizational founding (in a collaboration with Dr. Fredrik O. Andersson that surveys newly-founded organizations about their launches) as well as forwards to the changing ways in which nonprofit organizations are securing the resources they need to deliver their programs and services. For example, elements of competition are increasingly influencing philanthropic endeavors.

Competitive Philanthropy

One multi-faceted project in this space emerged from a collaboration with Brackets for Good (BFG), a nonprofit that hosts fundraising tournament using a bracket-style format and has raised over $6,350,000.00 for nonprofit organizations in 19 locations as well as nationally. Drs. Cali Curley, Marlene Walk, and I study the overlapping and distinguishing features of crowdfunding, gamification, and traditional philanthropy to assess both the competitive philanthropic environment and organizational performance within this environment.

Cross-border Philanthropy

Cross-border philanthropy occurs across multiple dimensions simultaneously. Seemingly domestic actors become players in international spheres, shattering the idea of a domestic/international dichotomy with clear lines delineating these spaces This line blurring obscures monetary flows and highlights questions regarding nonprofit accountability in a transnational context. Together with Galia Feit and Osnat Hazan of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for Law and Philanthropy, we present a study tracking money from US INGOs to Israeli NGOs, demonstrating the advantages and challenges to a big data approach and highlighting the importance of local partners.