Creative Placemaking: Building Partnerships to Create Change

Arts, artists, and creative strategies can be critical vehicles for planning to achieve social, economic, and community goals. Creative placemaking is one type of arts-led planning that incorporates both stakeholder participation and community goals. Yet, questions exist around who participates in the creative placemaking process and to what end. Our study discusses a case where a state-sponsored workshop brings people from diverse backgrounds together to facilitate community development and engagement through creative placemaking. In particular, the event discussed in this study highlights how a one-shot intervention can reshape perceptions of creative placemaking held by planners, non-planners, artists, and non-artists. Our study also shows that while pre-workshop participants tended to identify resource-based challenges, post-workshop participants focused more on initiating collaborations and being responsive to community needs. The different attitudes before and after the state-sponsored workshop demonstrate the importance of facilitating stakeholder understanding and engagement for successful creative placemaking

Revenue Embeddedness and Competing Institutional Logics: How Nonprofit Leaders Connect Earned Revenue to Mission and Organizational Identity

The increasing reliance on earned revenue displayed by nonprofits in the US has raised mission-related organizational identity concerns. However, the effect of a market-driven activity on mission-driven service may vary based on revenue embeddedness: the activity’s connection to the organization’s mission. This study draws on the competing logics of isomorphism and resource dependence to examine how the pursuit of earned revenue affects the organization’s perception of its mission and projection of identity. The authors examine how leaders use language to connect market to mission, presents additional dimensions of embeddedness, and offers propositions for future research

Mission-Based Objectives, Market-Based Funding: The Relationship between Nonprofit Enterprise and Service Delivery

Business: 3rd Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Graduate Research Forum)This paper addresses the relationship between earned revenue activities and core service delivery in nonprofit organizations. Two key assumptions drive this study: (1) organizations are resource-dependent and (2) nonprofit organizations are mission-driven. Past studies have examined earned revenue as aggregate measures, i.e.: the sum of all market-driven income activities, or the sum of revenue from program/service related activities. Some of these studies argue earned revenue complements service delivery because organizations can use this financial resource to invest in the organizational technologies and acquire the resources needed to deliver their core services. Other studies have considered the potential negative effects because the pursuit of this type of income can crowd out income from other sources, in effect becoming a substitute for service activities. However, not all market-based activities may affect service volume and access in the same way. This study uses fixed effects regression to analyze data from 2115 arts and culture organizations over a period of four years in order to to assess the embeddedness (use of the same organizational technologies, targeting the same markets) of the market-driven activity relative to the core mission activity. Findings show that activities that are fully embedded are positively related to increases in service volume, but earned revenue activities that are not fully embedded – that is, that share some but not all organizational inputs or target markets – are negatively related to both service volume and service access. These findings may help nonprofit organizations considering the pursuit of earned revenue to determine the best strategy to complement service delivery.A three-year embargo was granted for this item

The Scale of Mission-Embeddedness as a Nonprofit Revenue Classification Tool: Different Earned Revenue Types, Different Performance Effects

Nonprofits rely on earned revenue to remain sustainable. Prior studies have generally aggregated all earned revenue and evaluated its influence on financial sustainability. Our study takes a different approach, assessing the effects of three different types of earned revenue on an immediate program outcome. We use Cultural Data Project data from 2,000 arts and culture nonprofits from 2004-2012. We find that embedded and integrated earned revenue are linked to better program outcomes while external earned revenue is related to poorer program outcomes. Results depend on type (performing vs. visual arts) and funding structure (donative vs. commercial)

Is “overhead” a tainted word? A survey experiment exploring framing effects of nonprofit overhead on donor decisions

Nonprofit overhead ratios (i.e. proportion of funds spent on fundraising and/or management) have long been used as a proxy for nonprofit efficiency. Prior studies find that donors negatively respond to charities with higher overhead. Using a survey experiment, we explore whether providing different types of information about overhead alleviates this donor aversion. When asked to choose between two organizations as donation recipients, donors preferred the organization with lower overhead. However, when presented with information that described the purpose of higher overhead as building long-term organizational capacity, an increased proportion of donors chose to give to the organization with higher overhead. Omitting the word “overhead” further increased the proportion of donors choosing the organization with higher overhead. This study adds to our understanding of overhead aversion and has practical implications for nonprofits that rely on voluntary private contributions to achieve their missions

The Intersection of Nonprofit Roles and Public Policy Implementation

Many nonprofit organizations implement policy through service delivery. In addition, these nonprofits serve other roles in their communities. Policy implementation strategies that overlook the many roles nonprofits play may misunderstand implementation challenges or fail to maximize the benefits of public-nonprofits partnerships. We aim to inform policy implementation by presenting a narrative that explores the intersection of these nonprofit roles and policy implementation through nonprofit service delivery. We situate this focus on nonprofits as policy implementers within a framework of nonprofit roles. We present commentary that integrates policy implementation and nonprofit roles by focusing on four themes: nonprofit role simultaneity, service delivery/policy implementation perceptual asymmetry, nonprofit roles over time, and network participation. Accounting for this multidimensionality can help government actors facilitate partnerships that enable service delivery while also recognizing what nonprofits do independent of their formal arrangements with governments

Organizational sensegiving: Indicators and nonprofit signaling

Resource acquisition depends upon the agreement between an organization's sense of identity and the perceptions of organizational identity held by resource providers. To smooth the flow of resources and buffer against potential issues, organizations seek to manage external perceptions and, to the extent possible, control their organizational identity. Using exploratory factor analysis, we examine the data from 300 GuideStar profiles to develop a sense of how nonprofit organizations “give sense” to resource providers and attempt to manage their organizational identity. We find evidence of three sensegiving strategies. We then use a seemingly unrelated regression model to examine the relationship between these strategies and revenue outcomes, finding evidence that (a) nonprofit organizations demonstrate intentional sensegiving, and (b) different sensegiving approaches are related to different income streams

Beyond Cans and Capacity Nonprofit Roles and Service Network Objectives in an Emergency Food Network

Many essential public services are provided through networks of community‐based nonprofit organizations. Previous research has demonstrated that simply providing additional resources to these organizations is insufficient to better address demands for public services. We also know little about how and why these organizations adopt network‐level objectives related to service provision. In this analysis, we expand the focus of service provision beyond capacity to incorporate the unique roles that define the very existence of nonprofit organizations, and how these roles affect organizational behavior with respect to service network objectives. We use focus group, survey, and administrative data from one hundred community‐based nonprofit organizations in an emergency food service network to explore the relationships among capacity, roles, and specific program objectives

Message (In)Congruence: Tweeting While Competing for Donations

Nonprofit organizations rely on social media to build relationships with their stakeholders and solicit the resources they need to provide their programs and services. This online activity takes place in an increasingly competitive environment. We draw on the situational theory of publics, stakeholder theory, giving motivation, and gamification to examine this question: When organizations engage in competitive philanthropy, what framing is more effective at generating donations on an online platform? We confirm the relationship between tweeting and donation solicitation and shed light on some specific types of messaging associated with increased donations.This study was conducted while the authors were employed at the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI. We are thankful for the collaboration with Brackets for Good. We are also thankful for support from our research assistants Emily Peterson and DeeAndria Hampton. This study was partly funded by grants from IUPUI's Sports Innovation Institute and Indiana University's Lilly Family School of Philanthropy

Giving to Israel: American Institutional Philanthropy to Israeli Nonprofits

The Israeli nonprofit sector raises more than half of its philanthropic funding from abroad; thus, the scope of giving from US to Israel is a topic of constant curiosity. The trends of giving in recent decades as well as questions regarding focus on causes, impact and magnitude continue to provoke both theory and practice.In this report, we shed light on two basic questions: Who gives? And how much? Additionally, we reveal how, even in the era of detailed reporting and digital data, transparency is vague, and thorough manual inquiry is still necessary