How preexisting beliefs and message involvement drive charitable donations: an integrated model

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how individuals respond to messages asking for donations in broadcast advertising. It does so by considering both preexisting attitudes and beliefs related to donating, as well as message processing. The goal is to uncover messages that may help nonprofit organisations increase donations. Design/methodology/approach The research combines the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) to measure preexisting beliefs and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to measure involvement in an investigation of donation responses to broadcast-quality advertisements developed by a professional ad agency featuring the following two messages: one that leverages social norms and another that legitimises minimal giving. Two studies collected data from a total of 544 respondents in two between-subjects 2 × 2 × 2 experiments. Findings Injunctive norm messages affect the intended donation behaviour of individuals who are pre-disposed to donating, but only if they are highly involved with the ad. Social legitimisation messages affect donations from individuals who look to referents to direct behaviour, but unlike what was expected, only by those not highly involved with the ad. Similarly, individuals who do not think they can donate increased donations when they saw the legitimisation message and had low advertisement involvement. Research limitations/implications Results extend the ELM-TPB integrated framework by discovering when and how involvement drives intended donation behaviour. The research also sheds light on message processing by focussing on the preexisting characteristics of recipients. Practical implications The results provide nonprofit managers with strategies to increase donations with targeted messages. Those who pay attention to the ad and have a positive attitude toward giving are going to donate if they are told others support the cause. Therefore, the focus should be on those who are not involved with the ad but still believe giving is appropriate. Originality/value This research is the first to use the ELM-TPB framework to discover that ELM has varying utilities and values from TPB in different ad contexts.

Exploring partnerships between nonprofit organisations in New Zealand

<p>Nonprofit partnership with government and with business is well documented in the literature. However partnership between nonprofit organisations has largely been ignored. This research focuses on such New Zealand partnerships. It investigates three aspects of partnership: the reasons why organisations partner, the resources they allocate to those partnerships, and the competencies used by the people managing the partnerships. How these three partnership aspects influence each other and the effect of that on the partnerships is also explored. The study focuses on the ‘partnership’ rather than the ‘co-existence’ end of Craig and Courtney’s (2004) continuum where elements such as working from agreed values, sharing resources and decision making, and developing systems to support the partnership will be evident. Two partnerships were selected as case studies. Data came from semi-structured interviews with seven participants from five partner organisations. The literature provided a framework for analysing the interview data in relation to the three aspects of partnership. This framework led to the identification of four new motivational factors, two new resource allocations and two new competencies. The literature also provided six theories that help explain partnership motivations. In addition to the three aspects (motivation, resources, and competencies) of partnership, it became clear that these things made a difference: · the term used to describe what they were doing – collaboration or partnership, · the context, · the presence of trust and goodwill, · voluntary participation in partnership, and · the level of formality. The findings demonstrated that the motivation to partner at all was the most important of the three aspects of partnership. It influenced resource allocations and the competencies used by partnership managers. Resource allocations did not influence the motivation to partner but influenced the competencies used by the partnership managers. And the competencies used by the partnership managers influenced the resources allocated by organisations but generally did not influence the motivation to partner. The findings add to our knowledge about nonprofit-nonprofit partnership and will help people to plan partnerships. I also propose five areas for further research: · factors that influence formality, · factors that prevent nonprofit partnership, · role of competencies in motivating partnership, · quantity of resources and the impact on outcomes, and · ownership of intellectual property.</p>

Exploring partnerships between nonprofit organisations in New Zealand

<p>Nonprofit partnership with government and with business is well documented in the literature. However partnership between nonprofit organisations has largely been ignored. This research focuses on such New Zealand partnerships. It investigates three aspects of partnership: the reasons why organisations partner, the resources they allocate to those partnerships, and the competencies used by the people managing the partnerships. How these three partnership aspects influence each other and the effect of that on the partnerships is also explored. The study focuses on the ‘partnership’ rather than the ‘co-existence’ end of Craig and Courtney’s (2004) continuum where elements such as working from agreed values, sharing resources and decision making, and developing systems to support the partnership will be evident. Two partnerships were selected as case studies. Data came from semi-structured interviews with seven participants from five partner organisations. The literature provided a framework for analysing the interview data in relation to the three aspects of partnership. This framework led to the identification of four new motivational factors, two new resource allocations and two new competencies. The literature also provided six theories that help explain partnership motivations. In addition to the three aspects (motivation, resources, and competencies) of partnership, it became clear that these things made a difference: · the term used to describe what they were doing – collaboration or partnership, · the context, · the presence of trust and goodwill, · voluntary participation in partnership, and · the level of formality. The findings demonstrated that the motivation to partner at all was the most important of the three aspects of partnership. It influenced resource allocations and the competencies used by partnership managers. Resource allocations did not influence the motivation to partner but influenced the competencies used by the partnership managers. And the competencies used by the partnership managers influenced the resources allocated by organisations but generally did not influence the motivation to partner. The findings add to our knowledge about nonprofit-nonprofit partnership and will help people to plan partnerships. I also propose five areas for further research: · factors that influence formality, · factors that prevent nonprofit partnership, · role of competencies in motivating partnership, · quantity of resources and the impact on outcomes, and · ownership of intellectual property.</p>

Defining Boundaries: Towards an Identity of The Malaysian Third Sector

Reviews of the literature suggest the Malaysian third sector lacks basic descriptive information. Research on what makes up the sector is scarce, indicating little effort was undertaken to define and identify its components from the Malaysian perspective. This paper proposes the scope of the Malaysian third sector by suggesting its boundaries and identifying the constituents. Inclusion was based on the structural-operational definition of third sector organisations developed by Salamon and Anheier (1992, 1996) and the primary basis for exclusion is distribution of profits to shareholders and promoters. It is proposed that social, voluntary, non-governmental and nonprofit organisations make up the Malaysian third sector, while state linked organisations and profit-distributing organisations such as cooperatives and social enterprises are excluded. Knowing the third sector’s boundaries and constituents would allow more focussed research to be undertaken; enabling actors, researchers, and policymakers to identify issues and develop policies and strategies to address them.

Interviewing Elite Donors: Gaining Access, Developing Rapport and Dealing with the Dazzle

Elite donors are a crucial and sought-after source of funding for many nonprofit organisations, but there is a dearth of substantive empirical studies presenting primary data on such donors’ motivations, experiences and perspectives. There are challenges for social scientists in conducting interviews with elites, notably: gaining access to elite donors; developing sufficient rapport to discuss a topic that involves money and morals; and making sense of data without being dazzled by striking surface differences between elites and non-elites. These barriers have resulted in a long-standing over-reliance on secondary sources and on interviews with proxies such as foundation staff and wealth advisers. This paper reviews the small body of work that presents findings from interviews with elite donors and draws on my experience of conducting interviews with 46 wealthy UK donors, in order to critically analyse the implementation of this research design. This paper adds to the literature by extending understanding of elite donors’ reasons for agreeing to be interviewed and contributes to advancing third sector research by highlighting strategies to overcome challenges in conducting elite interviews in order to gain a less mediated understanding of the contexts, cultures and subjectivities of their focus of study.

Building Organisation-Community Relationships in Co-Creative Social Networking Platforms: An Ecological Systems Perspective

Nonprofit organisations use social networking platforms to interact, engage, and build productive relationships with target audiences for co-created outcomes. This chapter pursues two interrelated objectives: First, it identifies key stages in the growth of organisation-community relationships on co-creative social networking platforms. Second, it discusses the multi-levelled factors influencing these relationships at the respective stages. To achieve these objectives, we make a general review of scholarship on nonprofit use of social media, social networking platforms for co-creation, and organisation-public relationships on social media. We used the ecological systems perspective to identify the internal and external environmental influences on organisational relationships in social networking platforms. This chapter presents three abstract stages of organisation-community relationships: emergence, growth, and collapse, based on existing empirical observations and theoretical perspectives. We reveal four levels of ecological-based factors that influence different stages of organisation-community relationships on co-creative social networking platforms. We indicate the potentially strong and weaker influences on organisational relationships.

The messenger matters: environmental nonprofit organisations’ public faces, information recipients’ worldviews, and the credibility of ENPOs’ disclosed policy information

Environmental nonprofit organisations (ENPOs) have become crucial policy actors who have undertaken information campaigns to attract public attention and to gain public support for policies. However, the credibility of policy information released by ENPOs is understudied. To fill the gap, this study utilised Douglas and Wildavsky’s cultural theory (CT), to seek answers to two questions: 1) how do ENPOs’ public faces affect public perception of the credibility of the policy information released by their organisations? 2) how do the public’s worldviews affect trust in information released by ENPOs with different types of public faces? The evidence from an online survey confirms what CT predicted: Hierarchs tend to believe information released by policy actors with proper authority; individualists tend to believe information released by policy actors who favour economic growth over environmental protection; egalitarians favour all pro-environmental policy information even if the information is released by noncredible policy actors.

Performance measurement, evaluation and accountability in public philanthropic foundations

Philanthropic foundations routinely evaluate and measure the performance of nonprofit organisations to which they distribute funds, as well as the programmes that are funded. Another aspect of philanthropic foundations’ evaluation processes, which receives comparatively little attention within academic or practitioner literature, concerns evaluations of grant applications. While the focus of philanthropic evaluation literature is mainly on ‘how evaluation is done’, the focus of this article is on ‘how evaluation is understood’. This article details perspectives from interviews with 28 managers and trustees of Public Ancillary Funds as part of a wider study on the accountability of foundations. These public foundations must fundraise from the public, and donations to them are deductible against the taxable income of the donor, resulting in a significant element of accountability to the public for their effectiveness and evaluation of the distribution of their funds. Four main themes emerged through the exploration of how evaluation is understood from the perspective of these senior foundation leaders: motivations, values, criteria and processes of evaluation.