A quasi-experimental design (N = 517) was used to investigate the effect on audience response to a supported charity if corporate support is featured in an advertisement. The results indicate that corporate support of a charity appears not to influence audience attitudes and donation intentions for the charity. A small portion of the audience may be motivated to donate when learning of a large corporate donation to the charity. The level of individuals’ favorability for the charity was the strongest predictor of their attitudes and intentions. Gender was also a predictor of more positive charity attitudes, with females reporting more positive attitudes than males for three of four charities. Managerial implications and areas for future research are discussed.

In this exploratory study into the relationship between participation in charitable activity and self-reported measures of personal wellness, social exchange theory was used to model factors that operationalize socioeconomic variables as costs, religious orientation and charitable orientation as rewards, and wellness as profit. Structural equation modeling was applied to data from the 2004 General Social Survey, including the Module on Altruism, to measure the effects, both direct and indirect, and infer knowledge from the results. Results suggest the indication of a relationship between charitable behavior and personal wellness is valid. Specifically, those who are more charitable and those with an enhanced religious orientation exhibit greater wellness. Results also indicate that charitable orientation acts as a mediating variable between income, education, religiosity, and wellness.

This article discusses some potentially harmful consequences of the Big Society agenda for small voluntary organisations, using a theoretical framework suggested by the later work of Pierre Bourdieu. I explore the way in which a voluntary self-help group for people with heart disease evolved, as a result of the pursuit of external funding. This paper focuses on the rapid rise of specific kinds of leaders—members with a professional background, relevant skills and an orientation to the group that enabled them to pursue funding opportunities and to gain increasing control despite the opposition of the long-standing volunteers and the founders of the group. I conclude that government policy to enhance the role of the voluntary sector in the delivery of welfare services may encourage certain kinds of leaders to become powerful in small voluntary organisations. This may adversely affect their organisational structure and lead members to feel dispossessed.

Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and social movements are often juxtaposed as two distinct modes of action within civil society. While NGOs are seen as being linked to the interests of donors and being composed primarily of middle-class professionals, social movements are presented as a more authentic expression of grassroots perspectives. While academic literature compares and contrasts these two forms of organisation in the abstract, there has been comparatively little research exploring how civil society actors themselves conceptualise the NGO/social movement dichotomy and how this influences their strategic decision making. The Kheti Virasat Mission (KVM), working in the North Indian state of Punjab, is a useful case for exploring this issue. KVM is one of a growing number of groups working in the field of sustainable agriculture that has chosen to adopt a social movement model of organisation and distance itself from NGOs. The case helps illuminate how and why social movements differentiate themselves from NGOs and the challenges they face in doing so.

Many of the world’s largest and most impactful transnational NGOs are registered in the United States where they engage in significant fundraising activities to support their global operations. Their reliance on the external environment for financial support exposes them to resource dependence and the possibility of external control. However, as civil society organizations organized as firms, transnational NGOs attempt to maintain operational independence from the donors upon which they rely for funding. This article contributes to resource dependence theory by identifying the strategies that transnational NGOs employ in response to resource dependence, explaining the emergence of strategic response, and exploring the conditions under which NGOs are capacitated to preserve organizational autonomy. The responses transnational NGOs employ include alignment, subcontracting, perseverance, diversification, commercialization, funding liberation, geostrategic arbitrage, specialization, selectivity, donor education, and compromise. Elements of this strategic repertoire empower NGOs to resist external control, even circumventing and influencing donor preferences. Findings are based on in-depth, face-to-face interviews with top organizational leaders from a diverse sample of transnational NGOs registered in the United States.

The article examines the recent emergence of ‘volunteering’ as a publicly significant notion and practice. Based on an extensive fieldwork in a prominent intermediary NGO in Israel, the article follows the efforts to promote and expand ‘volunteering’ pursued by the organization’s board and staff members. Affiliated with the privileged social strata of Ashkenazi (European) Jews, whose hegemonic position has been eroded during the neoliberal transformations in Israel, the NGO staff seek to retain their privileged status through a managerial activity in the field of ‘volunteering’. They promote a particular, liberally inspired construction of ‘volunteering’, while universalizing it as a professional, a-political and consensual realm. Inspired by critical studies of ‘whiteness’, the article describes how the privileged character of this managerial activity is being successfully obscured through the representation of ‘volunteering’ as an all-inclusive aspiration.

Although nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in post-socialist countries have been under a microscope since their inception, their relations with the state are only beginning to come into focus and to be the subject of comparative and theoretical assessment. What these relationships mean to different stakeholders, whether they take trajectories similar to those in the West, and how they will be shaped by socialist legacies, are important questions to address before such relations are naturalized as “the way things are.” This paper examines NGO/state relations in the development of health care and disability services in Croatia, a nation newly admitted to membership in the European Union. The paper explores policy and institutional legacies, health care privatization, and relations with health professionals as forces affecting the financing, structure, and experience of relationships between NGOs and the post-socialist state.

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.

Sport governing bodies play a critical role in the sport system. The purpose of this study is to analyze their financial condition, a topic that has been largely neglected in previous research. Based on financial portfolio theory, it was suggested that the level of revenue diversification has a positive effect on their financial condition (measured through total revenues, break even, profit, and investments). Also, the influence of sport-related and financial success factors was examined using data from a nationwide online survey of sport governing bodies in Germany (n = 1,080). The results provided evidence of a relatively high level of revenue diversification compared with other industries. Revenue diversification, hosting major sporting events, and cost optimization had a positive effect on the financial condition, while increasing memberships in clubs and organizing competitions had a negative influence. The findings have implications for the management of sport governing bodies.

Aid fragmentation is considered a burden for recipient countries. NGOs as important channellers of official development assistance can contribute significantly to this fragmentation. This article is a first attempt to conceptualize and measure NGO aid fragmentation while identifying the complex set of (contradictory) incentive structures. The Belgian case, with its multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic setting, and multi-layered government structures is a crucial case for showing the possible variety of factors which may influence fragmentation. The research finds that fighting aid fragmentation may prove a lot more difficult than suggested because, in the Belgian case, with its multiple incentive structures, fragmentation actually pays off for NGOs.

The objectives of this paper are to map strategies for resource mobilization of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in different sectors in heavily aid-dependent Cambodia and analyse the past and future trends of each of the evolving strategies. The data used is the product of a national survey revealing NGOs’ key funding sources and trends in a 10-year period from 2006 to 2016. Foreign grants and donations are still dominant, but one out of five NGOs surveyed engage in earned-income activities, and this trend is expected to increase in the next 5 years. This study contributes to the on-going academic and development debate about the struggles non-profit organizations face and the ensuing strategies for mobilizing funding. It also raises questions about the potential effects of different strategies for resource mobilization, social and ethical dilemmas, and the trade-off between different choices of funding resulting in a diversification strategy.

In recent decades, the emergence and development of pan-European civil society organisations have been prominent, including those representing interests of marginalised groups and raising related social issues. Typically composed of national and European level umbrella organisations, some of these organisations have grown as important interlocutors between EU institutions and civil society, and derive legitimacy for their advocacy and lobbying activities by claiming broad representativeness. Through a comparative study of five principal EU-based civil society organisations, the present article analyses how these organisations, operating at multiple levels with their membership based on extensive geographical areas, acquire internal representation of members and beneficiaries.

The study examined the contribution of macro-intervention social workers to volunteer activists from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Volunteer activists who were supervised by macro-intervention social workers were compared with those who were not supervised. The comparisons related to internal variables (leadership competence and client participation), as well as to external variables (community activity, and representation), and to support from rabbis for community activity. The sample consisted of 62 activists who were supervised by macro-intervention social workers, and 101 activists who were not. The findings revealed differences between the supervised and non-supervised activists with regard to levels of community activity and representation. With regard to leadership competence and client participation, no significant differences were found. Analysis of the study findings aimed to provide new perspectives on the contribution of professional supervision, as reflected in the differences found between the activists who were supervised versus those who were not.

This paper is a contribution to the ongoing discussion concerning factors determining the development of civil society in a post-state socialist context. It examines the financial mechanisms designed to promote civic engagement in Poland, including EU grants and the so-called ‘percentage law’ that allows citizens to support NGOs of their choice with 1 % of their taxes. A detailed analysis of these mechanisms demonstrates that they are advantageous for some types of non-governmental organizations and not for others. Instead of enhancing the situation of the whole sector, they tend to support NGOs that already have substantial resources and hold a strong position vis-à-vis the state. Moreover, organizations and groups fighting for issues considered to be controversial—such as women’s NGOs advocating for the right to abortion or criticizing authorities for their lack of concern when it comes to violence against women—have limited chances to gain financial support from both the state and those sources that are independent from the state. This shows how seemingly gender-neutral institutional arrangements may bring gendered results. The following analysis is based on available statistics (several reports provided by the Klon-Jawor Association, Social Diagnosis Reports from 2007 and 2011) and qualitative data (semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of the Polish media).

Competitive bidding for public subsidy allocation for welfare services has been widely applied in established welfare states since the 1980s. Studies conducted in these countries have inclined to understand competitive bidding as a financing initiative and use an array of “failure theories” to explain its challenges and failures. In contrast to these studies, the present study focuses on Hong Kong, a residual and semi-democratic welfare state, and investigates competitive bidding as a governmental policy instrument designed to increase the legitimacy of subsidy award decisions. Based on an analysis of submissions in a recent policy review and a review of existing policy documents, we suggest that the government may have increased its decision-making power over NGOs, resulting in little advancement, neither regarding welfare mix, nor concerning the legitimacy of resource allocation.

This study proposes a revised agency theory for the nonprofit sector, distinguishes between the extent of agency and the extent of monitoring, and compares the magnitudes of the two impacts. Using panel data for 1998–2003, the paper tests whether monitoring by principal-stakeholders such as donors, clients, the government, and the board reduces the opportunity for executive misconduct such as extravagant spending on compensation and perquisites. Given the theory, the findings show that two effects influence CEO salaries. First, while nonprofit endowments provide a fiscal cushion in tough financial situations, by offering “organizational slack” they also increase the CEO’s opportunity to steal or raise her compensation (i.e., agency effect). Second, donors utilize monitoring mechanisms such as auditing or direct observations, which limit the opportunity for misconduct and reduce executive pay (i.e., monitoring effect). In the final analysis, the monitoring effect is greater than the agency effect, which implies that even if agency problems are present, the monitoring that donors provide offsets them.

As a major funder of the Third Sector, recent cuts in UK Government spending may require Third Sector Organisations (TSOs) to turn to other sources of funding, such as trading activities and public sector contracts. It has been argued that such changes can lead to economic objectives overwhelming social ones. This study utilises data from the 2008 National Survey of Third Sector Organisations to examine the relationship between the use of these alternative funding sources and organisations’ perceived success in achieving their primary objectives. As predicted by theory, a negative relationship between income from trading activities and achievement of objectives is found. Interestingly public sector contracts do not show a significant link with achievement of objectives. Social enterprise should therefore not be seen as an unqualified panacea for difficulties in social welfare provision in the UK, but public sector contracts need not necessarily lead to a loss of those elements that make the Third Sector provision attractive.

In Japan, a nonprofit organization system enacted in the late 1990s and the later introduction of privatization policies in human services were expected to overturn government dominance of nonprofit organization activities. By focusing on the long-term care insurance (LTCI) system, which privatized public human services for the first time in the country, this study empirically examines whether, and to what extent, nonprofit–government relationships in Japan have actually changed as a result of this new system. In addition, because LTCI newly allows for-profit organizations to provide services, the influence of such organizations were incorporated into the analysis. The outcomes of this study demonstrate that the government continues to extend its sphere of influence over nonprofit and for-profit organizations through LTCI. In addition, for-profit organizations appear to be more successful than nonprofit organizations, in that the former organizations have overcome their lack of experience as public service providers by taking over the roles that nonprofit organizations have traditionally occupied.

Nonprofit organizations serve the public good by offering services that benefit communities and the individuals who live in them. While many large for-profit companies and a few international nonprofits have begun voluntarily assessing and reporting their environmental, cultural, economic, and social sustainability performance in response to growing public awareness of sustainability issues, nonprofit organizations have generally been slow to adopt the practice. This paper makes the case that nonprofits have an obligation to assess and report sustainability performance to account for their positive and negative environmental, cultural, economic, and social impacts in the communities they serve precisely because of their promise to serve the public good; and that sustainability assessment and reporting are not only possible, but that they can actually offer several practical advantages for organizations that integrate the practice into their missions and models. Several sustainability reporting frameworks are reviewed. Two case examples are presented to illustrate the utility of sustainability assessments and reports for different types and sizes of nonprofit organizations. Challenges to the process of adoption and implementation of sustainability programs in the nonprofit sector are discussed.

This article investigates how NGOs’ reactions to donors may suggest their potential involvement in the policy process. Without pretending to abridge a multifaceted complicated situation in any singular factor or to make claims for causality and generalizability, the experiences of three NGOs in Lebanon are compared. The analysis reveals that a variation in NGOs’ relationship with the same donor might reflect on different level of involvement in the policy process and interactions with government. Constructing strong, yet balanced, ties with the donor contributes to active involvement in the policy process and cooperation with government. Otherwise, the NGO’s role is marginalized. Abandoning donor funding furthers change in the nature of NGO work, leaning more towards activism and generating confrontation with the government. Donor funding, therefore, is neither a necessary condition for nor a universal effect on NGOs’ potential engagement in public policy processes.