NVSQ Blog

Neighborhood Development Organizations – Tackling Neighborhood Disadvantage at the Intersection of Race and Resource Inequity

Bryant Crubaugh, Pepperdine University, Malibu.

Neighborhood equity requires more than the inclusion of nonprofits. How is the relationship between neighborhood development organizations and neighborhood disadvantage dependent on race, resources, and residential mobility? The answer to this question is vital as cities attempt to correct structural inequalities and rely on nonprofit organizations in their plans.

For example, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is attempting to tackle two persistent, decades-old issues within Chicago: violence and concentrated poverty. Throughout her first two years in office, nonprofit leaders have been meeting with and standing at her side. In February, before the onset of Covid-19 in the US, Chicago’s city leaders and nonprofit organizational representatives met to discuss plans to reinvest in long divested corridors in the West and South sides of the city, hoping to spur job growth and help long-isolated communities escape concentrated poverty. More recently, as Chicago has seen a continued increase in gun violence, Lightfoot has responded to calls with a formalized plan to lean on nonprofit organizations to help reduce violence, though the plan so far has not included significant steps away from traditional policing.

Generating satisfying volunteer experiences: How to design National Days of Service volunteer projects

Stephanie Maas^1,2,Lucas Meijs¹, Jeffrey Brudney³

¹Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, ²Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, ³University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA.

The way in which people volunteer is changing. An increasing trend is event-based, short-term activities, such as National Day of Service (NDS) volunteering events, rather than long-term, traditional or ongoing volunteer commitments. NDS events are common across the globe, for example, 9/11 Day, Make a Difference Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States, Sewa Day in 25 different countries, Mandela Day in South Africa, and NLdoet in the Netherlands – just to name a few. All of these examples are nationwide volunteering events in which individuals and groups support nonprofit organizations by contributing their time to one-day service projects. In NDS events volunteers may cook for the elderly, maintain buildings, gardens and playgrounds, support a fun afternoon for people with disabilities, and so forth.

These events mobilize large numbers of people to engage in volunteer service, creating enormous amounts of donated labor to help communities. But organizers of NDS events also intend to enhance the profile and create an ethic of volunteering. Intentions to continue volunteering typically depend on volunteer satisfaction, and volunteer managers are interested in achieving retention. This goal is not easy, due to the limited contact time between volunteer and volunteer management; moreover, general volunteer management practices used for long-term volunteer commitments might not work. Nevertheless, nonprofits can plan, structure, and organize NDS projects far in advance to enhance satisfaction of volunteer participants. So, how to design a NDS volunteer project to promote volunteer satisfaction?

FACT CHECK: Is there a crisis of trust in nonprofits?

Cassandra Chapman, Matthew Hornsey & Nicole Gillespie

University of Queensland

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that there is a crisis of confidence in the charity sector. In recent years a series of high-profile scandals have rocked the sector, including the Oxfam sexual exploitation scandal and the suicide of an elderly British donor Olive Cooke, who had received an estimated 3,000 charity appeals in the year before her death.

Scholars, practitioners, and the media have lamented falling trust in charities and worried about the ramifications for the nonprofit sector. Trust is known to be an essential ingredient for fundraising success. Drops in charity confidence could therefore threaten the survival of the sector as a whole.

My colleagues and I study charity scandals and trust in nonprofits. Through a series of experiments, we have demonstrated that scandals emerging within nonprofits have dire consequences for transgressing organizations. In fact, nonprofits lose trust and consumer support at faster rates after a scandal than commercial organizations do.

Nudging Charitable Giving: When and how to use nudging techniques to increase charity donations

Rebecca C. Ruehle*, Bart Engelen**, Alfred Archer**

*Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, **Tilburg University

It is Monday morning and you are rushing down a busy shopping street to get to work. Suddenly you are stopped by a friendly woman who asks you: “Excuse me, do you care about children that urgently need your help?”

Usually, if you see volunteers from charities and non-profit organizations approaching others on the street, you choose a different route. But they managed to catch you this time around. While you sympathize and see the good their organization is doing, you also think fundraisers are kind of annoying, intrusive and, quite often, even manipulative. They use all kinds of tricks to get you to donate and to give more than you otherwise would have done. They appeal to your emotions, tell you how much other people give, and steer you to a monthly donation instead of a one-off donation.

These behavioral influencing techniques, also called ‘nudges’, are not only used in street fundraising, but also in advertisements and online. You wonder: is messing with people’s decision-making processes to increase their donations permissible or even a good thing, or is it wrong and should charities refrain from doing it?

To answer this question, it is important to consider two things.