How Nonprofits Make Sense of Corporate Volunteering: Explaining Different Forms of Nonprofit-Business Collaboration

Abstract

Corporate volunteering (CV) is an increasingly common type of nonprofit-business collaboration and can take various forms, and its benefits for the business partner are well studied. The benefits for the nonprofit partner, however, are less evident and often questioned. This study investigates why nonprofits engage in and how they make sense of CV collaborations, building on the concepts of sensemaking and cognitive frames. Drawing on interviews with staff in nonprofit organizations, we reveal that decisions about CV collaborations usually go beyond the resources acquired through CV itself. We identify three different CV frames and show how they lead to different types of partnerships, hereby challenging the assumption that more integrative partnerships are superior to philanthropic ones. Our results show that depending on the frame used, different perceptions of the distribution of power between the nonprofit and the business partner exist, addressing the crucial role of how nonprofit organizations position themselves in such partnerships.