Can Philanthropy be Taught?

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Lindsey M. McDougle, Rutgers University; Danielle McDonald, Northern Kentucky University; Huafang Li, Grand Valley State University; Whitney McIntyre Miller, Chapman University; Chengxin Xu, Rutgers University.

Experiential philanthropy is an innovative teaching and learning approach that allows students to study social problems and then invest funds into nonprofit organizations that they consider to be best able to solve the social problems they learn about. Experiential philanthropy has become widespread within higher education and many within the field have begun recognizing its potential for developing future philanthropists. Despite this potential, there has been little evidence of the effectiveness of experiential philanthropy on students—or, communities. Therefore, we conducted a study to explore learning and development outcomes associated with the use of experiential philanthropy in the college classroom, and to ultimately answer the question: Can philanthropy be taught? Continue reading “Can Philanthropy be Taught?”

Children, Giving and Volunteering

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Christopher Einolf, Northern Illinois University and NVSQ author

When my daughter was born twelve years ago, my whole life changed overnight: gone were the days of slowly cooked meals, relaxing on Saturday afternoons, and going out at every weekend with friends. Time became very scarce, with long sleepless nights, loads of laundry, cooking and cleaning. Just getting to work on time was a challenge; doing things outside of work seemed impossible. Expenses went up too, with doctor bills, baby furniture, clothes, and car seats.

A new baby is a wonderful thing, but a new baby places huge demands on parents’ resources of money and time. How does the arrival of a baby affect a parent’s charitable giving and volunteering? And what happens when the baby grows older – does parents’ giving and volunteering change again? These questions were the subject of my recent NVSQ article, “Parents’ charitable giving and volunteering: Are they influenced by their children’s ages and life transitions? Evidence from a longitudinal study in the United States.” Continue reading “Children, Giving and Volunteering”

Rigour or relevance in philanthropy research? Choose both!

Tracey Coule, Research-to-Practice Editor, NVSQ.

1200px-UCB_Campanile‘Ivory tower academics have nothing useful to offer practitioners’. As a former non-profit practitioner-turned-academic responsible for running a professional doctorate, delivering management education, undertaking client-driven, applied research projects, and publishing research papers, I have often heard this charge from practitioners. Equally, I have heard academic colleagues refer to applied, client-commissioned research as the ‘poor relation’, ‘ugly sister’ or even not ‘proper’ research because it ‘lacks rigour’ and ‘can’t possibly produce high quality, publishable research’.

In this short piece, I would like to at least begin challenging both sets of assumptions by making three arguments. First, the rigour versus relevance debate is a fallacy. Second, the real issue (and solution) is one of language or, rather, translation. Third, it will take shared commitment and collective action to undertake such translation work and bridge the gap between academic, policy, and practice communities. Continue reading “Rigour or relevance in philanthropy research? Choose both!”

Behind the scenes of “Nonprofit Organizations Becoming Business-Like”

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Florentine Maier, Michael Meyer and Martin Steinbereithner, Vienna University of Economics and Business and NVSQ authors.

Our systematic literature review on Nonprofit Organizations Becoming Business-Like is an extremely dense piece of writing. We condensed the essence of 599 research publications into 8000 words. Under no circumstances can we distill it any further into a 600 word blogpost! What we want to do here, instead, is tell about the reasons why we wrote it, and provide some guidance on how to read it.

The article was inspired by the adage “when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade”: for over two years we had been trying to get research funding to conduct empirical research on the consequences of business-like forms of nonprofit organizing, as opposed to possible alternative forms. After three unsuccessful grant applications, each faltering because reviewers criticized us for not having covered the state of research sufficiently, we came to the conclusion that there apparently was no consensus on what actually constituted the relevant field of research. We had extensively read on the issue of NPOs becoming business-like, books piling up on our desks, folders bursting with printouts, our EndNote file getting bigger and bigger, and still reviewers pointing out this or that article that they considered as crucial and that we had failed to cite in our grant applications. Continue reading “Behind the scenes of “Nonprofit Organizations Becoming Business-Like””

Declining Volunteering and the Pressing Need to Ask Others to Help

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Jaclyn Piatak, University of North Carolina and NVSQ author

Unemployed volunteers devote more time but are less likely to receive an invitation to volunteer. America’s democracy heavily relies on a strong voluntary sector, where all citizens should be represented, or at least have the option, with everyone having an equal likelihood of being asked. Yet dedicated individuals may not volunteer simply because no one asks them.

Much research has examined who volunteers. Several social and demographic characteristics are associated with volunteering; from being white, female, and married to having a job and higher levels of education. Researchers often refer to this as dominant status model, where factors associated with prestige and respect in America increase a person’s likelihood of being asked to volunteer. Continue reading “Declining Volunteering and the Pressing Need to Ask Others to Help”

How I became a nonprofit sector professional

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Daniel King, Nottingham Trent University and NVSQ Author

Picture the scene. I am in my office at home surrounded by files, folders, spreadsheets, receipts, pieces of artwork and paint pots trying to write the final report for the funding body. For a small organization (which only had 5 part-time creative arts therapists and me managing the project for free), we seemed to have amassed a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy. This was not what I envisaged or set out to achieve when I entered the nonprofit sector. I never intended to be a nonprofit sector professional. But looking around my home office I am left wondering what it is that I have become?

In my recent paper in NVSQ, Becoming Business-like: Governing the Nonprofit Professional, I consider this question by examining the way I changed to see myself as a nonprofit professional. It tells the story of how I founded Creative Arts, a therapeutic arts charity, but also changed in the process of doing it. I narrate the process through which I slowly, and often without realising, over time changed from an idealistic dreamer, someone who Continue reading “How I became a nonprofit sector professional”

Participation or professionalization? A call to support democratic practices in nonprofits

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Jennifer Dodge, University at Albany—SUNY and NVSQ Author

The pressure for nonprofits to professionalize is enormous. I often think about this in the context of policy advocacy (advocating for particular policy positions using a variety of political strategies and tactics such as research, litigation, coalition building etc.), where the necessity to respond to changing political dynamics places “efficiency” at the top of the list of priorities. Developing a professional staff and relying on it to respond to the whims of a new administration, a change in political climate, or a new opportunity makes a lot of sense. The pressure to professionalize derives from these features of our political culture. It also derives from, or at least is reflected in, recent efforts to formalize nonprofit accountability structures, which require nonprofits to develop specific principles and statements to ensure accountability to the public, such as statements for handling conflicts of interest (this is the case in New York Nonprofit Revitalization Act of 2013, for instance). As with achieving greater efficiency, some form of formalization can make a lot of sense, especially when we are primed to think about high profile scandals where the nonprofit form is abused for personal gain. Continue reading “Participation or professionalization? A call to support democratic practices in nonprofits”