What Constitutes a New Nonprofit? Investigating Nonprofit Organizational Founding Dates

Abstract

The question of when a new nonprofit is founded has not been pursued with sufficient precision. Specifically, a fundamental challenge facing any nonprofit researcher planning to detect, isolate, and analyze new nonprofits is that nonprofit founding is a process, not a discrete event. This study uses administrative data that includes three different founding indicators from more than 4,000 arts organizations, supplemented with survey data from 242 organizations, to illustrate some of the problems inherent in treating the founding process as one discrete event. It also elevates the voices of founders to demonstrate their conceptualization of the concept and offer insights into the multidimensionality of founding.

Competition and Sensegiving: Nonprofit Markets and Organizational Signaling

“…We measure age straightforwardly as the number of years between the organization's reported incorporation date and the 990 tax year. We do note some limitations with this approach, and indeed with any approach of measuring the true age of nonprofit organizations (Levine Daniel & Andersson, 2021). The actual 'birth' of nonprofits has been notoriously difficult to identify and so we utilize the incorporation date under the assumption that this date should be relatively proximate to the point at which a young organization recognized the need to appeal to a broad stakeholder base.…”