In the past decade, nonprofits scholars have given increased attention to the topic of vulnerability and organizational demise. An early contribution to this literature wasFinancial distress is a common condition for many nonprofit organizations. Grants run out, or funders change their giving guidelines. Individual donor preferences change, or contributions are diverted to competing organizations. Government support declines, increases, and declines again. Sometimes, legal conflicts or fiscal mismanagement create financial shocks from which an organization cannot recover. Some organizations close as a result of financial distress, but some organizations recover. All else being equal, the difference between those that close and those that recover can usually be found in the idiosyncratic differences of management and financial arrangement.If we look back at any population of nonprofit organizations, we will see that some closed and some thrived. With a little work, we can probably determine some important differences between the two groups. However, these differences are practical only if they help us to look into the future and determine which nonprofits are currently vulnerable to financial distress. Prediction of distress is not only an interesting academic question but is also relevant to funders who want to spend their dollars wisely and managers who seek to keep their organizations viable.
The failure of a substantial portion of mail survey recipients to respond to invitations to participate in research projects raises issues of nonresponse error. Because this error is difResearchers who study nonprofit organizations draw on a wide range of empirical research methods. One common approach-geared toward comparing the same information for a large number of cases-is the survey research method. The general approach involves defining a population of
This article follows Knoke in exploring how public incentives offered by professional associations (such as lobbying on behalf of collective interests) compete with private incentives (such as member networking opportunity) in promoting monetary gifts, voluntary coproduction of organizational outcomes, and commitment to the association. Olson’s contention that public goods do not motivate civic engagement has fostered several decades of research geared toward establishing the role of such goods in associational outcomes. Based on membership surveys of three engineering associations and two health care associations, the study concludes that private incentives are not universal motivators, while public incentives show some evidence of motivating engagement. Unexpected differences between the two fields of professional association are striking, prompting suggestions that current practitioners and future research give attention to field differences and resist overgeneralization regarding engagement motivations, outcomes, and commitment across professional fields.
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