A Shock to the Status Quo: Characteristics of Nonprofits That Make Strategic Decisions During a Crisis

Over the past three years, the nonprofit sector has undergone a profound change. This study examines the changes nonprofits made in response to COVID-19 and looks at the characteristics of the most adaptive nonprofits. It finds that the nonprofit sector displayed resilience and adaptation and provides a roadmap for nonprofit success during uncertainty. Many nonprofits recovered rapidly after 2020 and have implemented long-lasting changes since. Sixty percent of nonprofits have engaged in a strategic planning process since the pandemic, and 44% have added new online programs. Government partnerships during the crisis were crucial, as they influenced nonprofits' growth or retrenchment. Volatility of government funding led to shifts in strategies. Nonprofits with changed government funding, whether increased or decreased, reported higher percentages of new programming. While not surprising, the study also shows that greater challenges bring more changes to nonprofits – even though some changes may not be positive, such as reducing workforce size or cutting programs. This study underscores the crucial role of government-nonprofit partnerships, adaptable leadership, and proactive planning for changes during a crisis. It provides a roadmap that nonprofit leaders can use to navigate ambiguity, embrace change, and forge a sustainable path toward growth and impact

Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector

163 page pdf and alternative EPUB version.This textbook was written to accompany PPPM 280: Intro to the Nonprofit Sector at the University of Oregon.This text is designed to provide an introduction to the nonprofit sector. It is designed to help readers understand the definition of the sector, its role in society, and the key questions facing it. The book also considers the growing numbers and influence of social enterprises and other “social innovation” organizations. The most up to date and interactive version of this book can be found at https://opentext.uoregon.edu/intrononprofit (see clickable link above).Open Orego

The First Flight of the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS)

The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) sounding rocket experiment launched on July 30, 2021 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. MaGIXS is a unique solar observing telescope developed to capture X-ray spectral images, in the 6 - 24 Angstrom wavelength range, of coronal active regions. Its novel design takes advantage of recent technological advances related to fabricating and optimizing X-ray optical systems as well as breakthroughs in inversion methodologies necessary to create spectrally pure maps from overlapping spectral images. MaGIXS is the first instrument of its kind to provide spatially resolved soft X-ray spectra across a wide field of view. The plasma diagnostics available in this spectral regime make this instrument a powerful tool for probing solar coronal heating. This paper presents details from the first MaGIXS flight, the captured observations, the data processing and inversion techniques, and the first science results.Comment: 20 pages, 18 figure

The First Flight of the Marshall Grazing Incidence X-Ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS)

The Marshall Grazing Incidence X-ray Spectrometer (MaGIXS) sounding rocket experiment launched on 2021 July 30 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. MaGIXS is a unique solar observing telescope developed to capture X-ray spectral images of coronal active regions in the 6–24 Å wavelength range. Its novel design takes advantage of recent technological advances related to fabricating and optimizing X-ray optical systems, as well as breakthroughs in inversion methodologies necessary to create spectrally pure maps from overlapping spectral images. MaGIXS is the first instrument of its kind to provide spatially resolved soft X-ray spectra across a wide field of view. The plasma diagnostics available in this spectral regime make this instrument a powerful tool for probing solar coronal heating. This paper presents details from the first MaGIXS flight, the captured observations, the data processing and inversion techniques, and the first science results

Data Files: The Impact of Ride Hail Services on the Accessibility of Nonprofit Services

This dataset is an Excel file that includes a coding sheet for transcripts of subjects interviewed. Interview subjects and transcripts were numbered based on L= nonprofit leader, C = client, so L1 is Leader 1. Direct quotations drawn from transcripts, copied and pasted. The coding columns have up to three codes and subcodes to one quote. The spreadsheet also includes coding instructions

The Impact of Ride Hail Services on the Accessibility of Nonprofit Services

Nonprofit organizations are responsible for providing a significant level of human services across the United States, often in collaboration with government agencies. In this work, they address some of the most pressing social issues in society – including homelessness, poverty, health care and education. While many of these organizations consider location and accessibility crucial to supporting their clients – often locating services near bus or train stops, for example – little is known about the impact of new technologies, including ride hail services like Lyft and Uber, on nonprofit accessibility. These technologies, which are re-shaping transportation in both urban and suburban communities, are expected to dramatically shift how people move around and the accessibility of services they seek. This exploratory qualitative study, making use of interviews with nonprofit executives and nonprofit clients, is among the first of its kind to measure the impact of ride hail services and other emerging technologies on community mobility and accessibility

Ideology and Local Public Expenditure Priorities

Local governments prioritize spending on various types and levels of public services. Although scholars have shown that citizen preferences and institutional factors, such as economic, political, and legal arrangements, play a role in resource allocation, scholars have not systematically examined the impact of local elected officials’ own ideological preferences on service prioritization. A better understanding of the impact of personal ideology on local government resource allocation is needed as this provision of funds has implications for democratic governance and responsiveness. We develop and use a novel measure of local elected official ideology using a 2011 survey of California local elected officials to test the hypothesis that local decision-maker ideology affects attitudes on funding-specific service categories. We find evidence that local elected officials’ attitudes toward service reductions are associated with both their own individual ideology, measured on the conservative–liberal spectrum, and the ideology of their constituents. </jats:p

Can institutional support improve volunteer quality? An analysis of online volunteer mentors

Volunteer management practices have been shown to have positive effects on employees in terms of skill development, job success, organizational identity, and morale in the public, nonprofit, and corporate sectors. Despite considerable research on volunteering, questions remain about how management practices of volunteer programs may affect volunteer performance. Leveraging data comparing self-enrolled and corporate-recruited volunteer mentors into a large-scale online program for entrepreneurs, this study measures the impact of institutional support on volunteer intensity, persistence, and quality. It also presents a novel way to measure volunteer quality through sentiment analysis to measure the tone of online messages, an emerging statistical technique. Findings suggest that a high level of institutional support leads to higher quality mentor engagement, compared to self-enrolled volunteers, while a low level of support leads to mentor quality much lower than self-enrolled volunteers

Politics, management, and the allocation of arts funding: evidence from public support for the arts in the UK

Studies of distributive public policy claim that electoral incentives shape the geographic distribution of government grants to individuals and organizations, such as those in arts and culture. Public management scholarship suggests that managers bring value to their communities and stakeholders within them through their capacity and skill. This study combines these literatures in a quantitative study of the geographic distribution of Grants for the Arts (GFA) in the UK between 2003 and 2006. Employing statistical regression techniques for count data, we find that GFA program in this period had a nonignorable distributive political character. Local authorities with swing voters for the governing party in Westminster received more GFA grants than did local authorities with its core supporters. We also find significant evidence that, at the same time, well-managed local authorities, as measured by performance assessment ratings, act as a magnet for GFA grants. Our conceptual discussion, quantitative modeling strategy, and results blend distributive politics and public management in a novel way for the study of cultural policy