Understanding nonprofit missions as dynamic and interpretative conceptions

Abstract

Missions are central to all nonprofit organizations, and establish their purposes. However, formal mission statements can fail to provide a true picture of a nonprofit’s mission. This article draws on prior scholarship on missions, including the role of interpretation and change, to propose two new concepts: personal and dominant mission conceptions that introduce a dynamic, socially‐constructed understanding of nonprofit mission. Personal mission conceptions are the interpretations that individuals within a nonprofit hold of the mission, while the dominant mission conception is the collective interpretation guiding a nonprofit during a specific time. Examples from two specific nonprofits are provided to demonstrate the conceptions, along with some guidance for how mission conceptions can inform future research and practice.

Does Use of Emotion Increase Donations and Volunteers for Nonprofits?

“…The lack of research on the framing of nonprofit missions is surprising considering the importance of this organizational artifact to this sector. Although some scholars downplay the importance of missions and highlight issues with decoupling, especially in the for-profit sector, (Bromley and Powell 2012), missions are the central focus of nonprofit organizations (Berlan 2017). As such, these texts are an important window into nonprofit organizations’ internal cultures and relationships to external actors.…”

“…Because volunteers and donors are advised to choose their area of passion before selecting a nonprofit to support (Bronfman and Solomon 2010), they come to a nonprofit with a priori expectations of how an organization within their passion area, or field, operates. As Berlan (2017) outlines, the sense-making process individuals go through upon encountering a nonprofit’s mission is conditioned, in part, by these a priori expectations and differing institutional logics. Moreover, different fields may attract different types of donors and volunteers.…”

“…Missions define the very purpose of a nonprofit (Minkoff and Powell 2006; Pope et al 2018) and motivate members toward a goal (Bart, Bontis, and Taggar 2001; Frumkin 2002). Stated more succinctly, “nonprofits only exist to pursue the specific public purposes that are expressed in their missions” (Berlan 2017:413). Consequently, the mission of the nonprofit takes center stage when making decisions and communicating goals and organizational identity to external publics.…”

“…Until recently, social scientists lacked the ability to evaluate aspects of nonprofit missions on any large scale. Most of the work done in this area was necessarily limited to small subsets of nonprofits (Berlan 2017; Pandey et al 2017; Patrick and Caplow 2018). In contrast, to test our hypotheses and provide previously unattainable insights, we utilize the new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) release of more than 2 million nonprofit tax filings.…”

A Networked Infrastructure of Cultural Equity? Social Identities in the Missions of Local Arts Agencies

“…Mission statements are, for some organizations, a primary impetus toward strategic goals, while other organizations consider them to be a routine artifact of bureaucracy that is not necessarily meaningful to their organization's operation (Pandey, Kim, and Pandey 2017). Still other research shows that formal mission statements do not always give an accurate view of an organization's mission, rather they are a socially-constructed interpretation that guides organizational practices (Berlan 2018) and that might even make an organization too rigid to adapt to changes (Bartkus, Glassman, and McAfee 2000). Despite the potential for differing functions of mission statements across organizations, they are a common piece of organizational information that can be used as a high-level indicator of organizational attention to particular themes.…”