Nonprofits as Advocates and Providers: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

While nonprofit organizations are frequently understood as influencing policy through advocacy, the policy influence of nonprofit service provision has not been widely acknowledged within the context of the policy process. In spite of this oversight, nonprofit organizations have significant discretion over the publicly funded services they provide, and public policy is continuously shaped through nonprofit service delivery. Furthermore, nonprofit organizations frequently embody the roles of interest group and policy implementer simultaneously. The advocate-provider framework presented here situates these concurrent nonprofit functions within the policy process context. This framework connects research and theory across policy process, public management, and nonprofit management scholarship. The advocate-provider perspective challenges assumptions from existing scholarship while highlighting the need for future research that jointly investigates nonprofit advocacy, public service provision, and policy processes.

Moving Beyond the Boundaries? Exploring Nexus Among Public Policy, Public Management, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Studies Fields

“…Fyall () proposes an advocate‐provider conceptual framework to capture the diverse roles and activities of nonprofit organizations within public policy and public management. The framework is grounded in an insightful examination and comparison of public policy, public management, and nonprofit management literatures and their treatment of nonprofit organizations, finding limitations in each.…”

Leveraging Nonprofit and Voluntary Action Research to Inform Public Policy

“…These mechanisms are important areas of study to understand how voluntary action becomes institutionalized as nonprofit organizations. The social movement itself may develop into a new nonprofit (e.g., the Civil Rights movement led to the creation of Children's Defense Fund) or bring together a range of nonprofit organizations into a coalition (Imig, ) and, if the movement results in policy change, then nonprofit organizations may implement those changes (Fyall, ; Sandfort, ).…”

“…There is a great deal of attention on advocacy in the NVA literature, some of which crosses into policy literature (Buffardi et al, ; Fyall, ; Pekkanen, Smith, & Tsujinaka, ). NVA scholars research the dynamics of advocacy both within nonprofit organizations (capacity and constraints) and across the sector (impacts of government funding on advocacy) and can be drawn on to expand what is now the lumped category of interest groups in the broader Political Science literature (Berry & Arons, ).…”

“…Two PSJ articles recently featured cross‐field research. Fyall () proposes the Advocate‐Provider framework to explicitly recognize that nonprofit organizations participate in both the policy formation through advocacy and policy implementation through their service delivery. Buffardi et al's () study informs the process of venue shopping (legislative/executive, level of government) and venue specialization (concentrating on one venue versus shifting among venues).…”

“…It was followed in 1985 with a second attempt to connect policy and nonprofit research (Miller & Collins, ), but it was not until about 16 years later that additional NVA research appeared in PSJ. To date, PSJ published NVA research related to implementation of public policy (Chambré, ; LeRoux, ), venue shopping (Buffardi, Pekkanen, & Smith, ), donor contributions and fundraising (Brooks, ; Nicholson‐Crotty, ), professional associations (Candler, ), lobbying and advocacy (Wyszomirski, ), nonprofit management (Brooks, ), impacts of public funding (Jung & Moon, ), and most recently, a conceptual approach to understanding the service delivery and advocacy roles of nonprofit organizations (Fyall, ) . These are important cross‐field contributions but there are more that can be made.…”