Financial measures provide an empirical basis from which nonprofit researchers and practicing managers can approximate organizational capacity, financial health, and performance. These measures are used in nonprofit research to predict organizational activities and funding opportunities. Yet, little empirical evidence exists to tell us what these measures assess and whether they capture underlying concepts in the way we assume. Using Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 data, this article explores the following research question: Can accounting measures be organized into theoretically intuitive and empirically defensible constructs? To answer this question, a literature review of nonprofit financial health studies and textbooks was conducted, and dimension reduction techniques were employed. The findings suggest that the answer to the research question is not as simple as expected, and we should exercise more caution in how we use financial measures in nonprofit research.

Using Internal Revenue Service Form 990 information for all filing 501(c)(3) organizations from 1998 to 2003, this article explores the organizational and environmental factors that affect nonprofit financial health in two subsectors—human services and higher education. The results yield three noteworthy findings. First, theory and empirical data converge when four commonly used financial indicators are combined to form a single financial health construct. Second, accounting measures and revenue variables are not as clearly related to financial health as the literature suggests. Third, environmental variables including macroeconomic factors (gross domestic product and state product), community factors (median household income), as well as a nonprofit’s financial prominence in their policy area (revenue share) are strong predictors of nonprofit financial health. This research contributes to the literature in several ways, most notably by incorporating a more open-systems approach to the study of nonprofit financial health with the inclusion of several environmental variables.

Nonprofit infrastructure organizations provide multiple functions to the nonprofit sector: strengthening individual and organizational capacities, mobilizing material resources, providing information and intellectual resources, building alliances for mutual support, bridging the research and practice divide, and connecting nonprofits to the other sectors. Although researchers have described a variety of organizations that support nonprofit activity, they have done little to distinguish them or to explain their primary purposes. In this article, we develop a typology to classify these nonprofit infrastructure organizations, which offers new insight into their various objectives and functions. Based on a review of the relevant literature and interviews with stakeholders, we then construct a necessary framework for the assessment of the infrastructure organizations we have identified. The result is a better understanding of not only the types of nonprofit infrastructure organizations but also the appropriate dimensions for their assessment.

This study explores the circumstances under which certain collaborative tools are adopted, and whether some tools are typically used in combination with others. We share the view of other scholars that collaboration practice is ahead of scholarship. Accordingly, we ground our analysis and conclusions on the observations provided by a sample of public managers who participate actively in collaborations. Findings from interviews with managers about the use of collaborative tools in their jurisdictions demonstrate that certain tools are used together, and that collaborations can be understood along three dimensions—structure of the collaboration, shared governance arrangements, and commitment of both parties to the collaboration. For researchers, this finding provides a foundation to comprehend, compare, and analyze collaborations across myriad policy domains. For practitioners, this result illustrates that collaborative tools are not interchangeable and are typically employed in three coherent groupings. For researchers and practitioners, the findings dispute common assumptions that greater collaboration (i.e., employing more tools) is productive and suggest that the emphasis might be more usefully placed on selecting and using the appropriate and parsimonious combination of tools to generate public value.

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