Investment income offers nonprofits a flexible and sustainable revenue source, yet it remains underexamined in the literature, particularly outside Western contexts. This study addresses that gap by analyzing panel data from Chinese foundations from 2018 to 2022 to examine how financial and political factors are associated with investment participation and investment income. We find that investment engagement among Chinese foundations is limited, and among participants, investment income levels are modest. Drawing on resource dependence and institutional theories, the analysis considers two financial conditions, financial autonomy and financial leverage, and a political factor, political connections. The findings deepen our understanding of nonprofit investment income and highlight how financial conditions and political connections relate to investment engagement and investment income.
Bullying is harmful and prominent in nonprofit organizations (NPOs), yet it remains understudied. This article investigates how public service motivation (PSM), which is trait-like, prosocial and vital to NPOs, may counterintuitively expose NPO workers to being bullied. Notwithstanding PSM’s many benefits, recent studies have identified a dark side of PSM that potentially may attract bullying from coworkers. This survey-based study in the New Zealand nonprofit sector ( N = 880) draws on social exchange theory and conservation of resources theory to examine the relationship between PSM and being bullied, the role of political behavior as a mediator, and constructive leadership as a moderator. Findings support all hypothesized relationships, except one. The article concludes with theoretical implications and practical recommendations to address challenges stemming from the dark side of PSM as well as to curb bullying in NPOs.
Environmental nongovernmental organizations (ENGOs) are key players in environmental governance, yet their connections with governments can shape public trust in complex ways. Challenging the assumption that closer nongovernmental organization (NGO)–government ties enhance legitimacy, this study examines how such ties affect trust, particularly under varying perceptions of governmental environmental performance. Through an online survey experiment in China, we find that government ties in the form of formal officials serving as board members generally weaken public trust in ENGOs, despite small effect sizes, with stronger effects when citizens perceive poor government environmental performance. The findings reveal a paradox: while citizens value ENGO independence, they also expect ENGOs to collaborate with capable governments. Overall, the study highlights the importance of state–NGO interactions in shaping public trust and underscores the need for ENGOs to balance access to state resources with organizational autonomy.
Indonesia, ranked the world’s most generous nation from 2017 to 2024, provides a distinctive setting to examine how values are associated with sustained humanitarian giving. This study investigates donations to Palestine in Aceh, Indonesia’s most charitable province and the only one under Sharia governance, using a mediated–moderated values–resources framework. Survey data from 508 respondents were analyzed using PLS-SEM (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling). Results show that altruistic, social, emotional, and organizational values are significantly associated with sustained donor engagement. Perceived socio-economic adequacy is not significantly associated with humanitarian donation intention but has a modest association with sustained engagement, suggesting that economic capacity is more relevant to continuity than intention formation. Humanitarian donation intention serves as a statistical mediating pathway, while religiosity is linked to sustained engagement directly and through moderation. The study highlights faith-informed, trust-based governance as relevant to long-term donor engagement.
Social services in the United States are delivered jointly by government and nonprofits. Prior research examines either the location or the resources of nonprofits; it rarely examines how these factors jointly influence social service availability or access. We leverage a unique dataset linking nonprofit headquarters and service site locations, along with organizational and neighborhood data. We find most nonprofits demonstrate neighborhood homophily, locating headquarters and service sites in demographically similar neighborhoods. However, we also find a distinctive set of nonprofits headquartered in affluent neighborhoods providing services in disadvantaged communities. Organizations serving neighborhoods with predominantly Black and Asian/immigrant populations are exposed to heightened fiscal vulnerability. Our study demonstrates how inequalities in access to nonprofit social services are shaped by the combination of where nonprofits provide services, the manner in which nonprofits spatially organize services across various sites, and the overall capacity of these organizations.
This study examines formal and informal volunteering among immigrants and natives in Denmark. Drawing on resource-based and culture-based perspectives, it develops and tests the theory that non-Western immigrants participate less in formal volunteering because of socioeconomic disadvantages and weak-tie deficits, but more in informal volunteering because of stronger reliance on close-knit networks and cultural orientations toward collectivism. Using pooled data from the Danish Volunteer Survey (2012, 2020, 2024) and zero-inflated negative binomial models of monthly hours spent on each activity, the results suggest that non-Western immigrants are less involved in formal volunteering than natives, owing primarily to resource and network disparities. However, the analysis finds no evidence that non-Western immigrants engage more in informal volunteering than natives, nor that cultural orientations explain differences in informal volunteering. These findings challenge cultural explanations of immigrant volunteering and underscore the importance of structural inequalities and network access in shaping participation in civil society.
This paper explores a notable paradox in nonprofit advocacy: nonprofit leaders frequently claim in surveys and interviews that they do not engage in advocacy or lobbying, but many of them often report conducting activities that qualify as such. This discrepancy, which we call the say/do gap, warrants further examination as it suggests that nonprofit advocacy may be more widespread than recent studies indicate. Drawing on the first nationally representative survey of U.S. nonprofit advocacy in two decades, this paper examines the say/do gap. Building on previous nonprofit advocacy research, we analyze why nonprofits report differently than they act, finding that discrepancies are linked to legal knowledge, coalition membership, stakeholder influence, and the institutional environment. We argue that the say/do gap results from the decoupling of policies and practices around advocacy, which enables nonprofits to leverage the benefits of advocacy while navigating stakeholder demands.
Volunteers play a central role in contemporary society, yet the value created through their contributions remains fragmented across academic literatures. Drawing on a systematic literature review of 146 academic articles, this study provides a comprehensive overview of volunteer value. It addresses the proliferation of terms used to describe value, changes in the volunteering landscape, and the expanding range of value recipients. The review conceptualizes volunteer value distribution across three analytical levels—micro, meso, and macro—and identifies a broad set of value types and recipients. In doing so, it advances research on volunteer value creation and distribution. This article calls for greater inclusion of the nonprofit sector in volunteer value research, increased attention to uneven value distribution among recipients, and further investigation into how volunteer value equity can be promoted.
This research note examines how volunteering has been defined and measured in Australia since the 1970s, and how those choices shape what becomes visible in policy and statistics. Drawing on a historical analysis of national surveys, government reports, and key scholarship, this study shows how statistical infrastructures mediate between domestic civic traditions, sector advocacy, and pressures for international comparability. The analysis identifies recurring tensions between formal and informal practices and demonstrates that definitional change has often outpaced measurement, producing systematic blind spots.
The COVID-19 pandemic constituted an unprecedented exogenous shock to many nonprofit organizations, testing their ability to sustain operations and adapt to crises. Building on population ecology and nonprofit organizational resilience framework, this study conceptualizes COVID-19 as a dual-structured crisis and examines how organizational factors, coupled with resilience tactics, shape nonprofit resilience. Results from 169 nonprofits highlight that specialist organizations (art and culture) are more vulnerable to external crisis than generalist nonprofits (human services). While donor support was critical for sustaining human-service organizations, peer support from other nonprofits emerged as a key factor for arts and culture organizations. In addition, system-wide constraints muted the effects of traditional strategies such as technology adoption and federal funding access on nonprofit resilience. Our findings underscore the context-dependent effectiveness of resilience tactics and offer new insights into managing nonprofits in future crises.
This article develops a framework to better understand philanthropic donations and volunteering among those who have left religion by testing interactions among four dimensions of religiosity (i.e., beliefs, values/morals, spiritual practices/rituals, and meeting attendance/community) and using religious residue theory, which suggests that people who leave religion occupy a middle space between the religious and those who were never religious. I find that beliefs like belief in God, values like generalized trust in others and subversion to authority, and spiritual practices like yoga, meditation, and being in nature interact with attendance at religious services to predict donations and volunteering beyond what any of these variables do individually. This framework is helpful for understanding giving behavior among the religious, the formerly religious, and those who were never religious, as most people fall within the spectrums of these four religiosity dimensions.
This study examined how the satisfaction and frustration of autonomy, competence, relatedness, and beneficence (the sense of prosocial impact) relate to volunteer well-being (meaningfulness of volunteer work, volunteer satisfaction, and general well-being) and ill-being (burnout and intent to leave). By investigating beneficence alongside the three basic psychological needs in Self-Determination Theory, we aimed to contribute to debates on its potential inclusion as a fourth basic need. Data from 650 Hungarian volunteers were analyzed using variable- and person-oriented approaches. Results indicated that the satisfaction of the established needs predicted well-being indicators (with outcome-specific patterns), and beneficence satisfaction emerged as a unique predictor beyond them. Ill-being was primarily associated with the frustration of autonomy and relatedness, whereas beneficence frustration showed no independent association with negative outcomes. Cluster analysis identified four distinct need profiles differing in well-being and ill-being. Findings highlight the central role of psychological needs in volunteer functioning.
While a growing body of research has examined the features of nonprofit donation appeals on social media and online user comments, little is known about how specific message constructs shape the content of user responses. Drawing on a large-scale dataset of 674,845 user comments associated with 14,319 donation appeals posted by 794 animal-related nonprofit organizations on Facebook in the United States, this study investigates how the design of nonprofit donation appeals influences the content of user comments. The analysis reveals that emotional sentiment and narrative features of donation appeals are associated with distinct patterns of comments. Specifically, certain appeal constructs are more likely to elicit comments signaling donation action or expressing gratitude, whereas others primarily evoke sympathetic responses. These findings advance understanding of how nonprofits can strategically shape audience interaction on social media and offer evidence-based guidance for aligning message design with specific organizational objectives in digital fundraising contexts.
