This study examined how board chairs and executive directors of nonprofit civic engagement organizations interpreted their leadership roles. Leadership in nonprofit civic engagement organizations was characterized by study participants as representing constituents, facilitating participatory processes, engaging in civic governance, and organizing community and developing leaders. Therefore, I contend that how nonprofit civic engagement organizational leadership was conceptualized by board chairs and executive directors was embedded in the institutional field of civic governance. An exploratory and qualitative case study analysis approach was utilized and data methods included interviewing 34 board chairs and executive directors from the population of 17 nonprofit civic engagement organizations within a municipal civic participation system. I identify and discuss four major leadership themes, with eight sub-themes, that emerged from the analysis and present recommendations for professional practice and future research on nonprofit leadership within institutional fields.

Social and sustainable initiatives generally start small and need to scale to create substantial impact. Our systematic review of 133 articles develops a better understanding of this scaling process. From the literature, we conceptualize impact as the result of two different pathways: ‘scaling out’ (extending geographical space or volume) and ‘scaling up’ (influence on public discourses, political agendas and legislation). The review identified strategy, actor characteristics and institutional environment as key factors for scaling. The literature indicates that for strategy a focus on open structures generates speed and higher impact, but we also found critical views on this. The literature shows that the actor characteristics such as the ambition to scale, equal focus on the economic and the social logic, entrepreneurial skills and leadership are positively related to the level of impact. The institutional environment influences actor characteristics and strategy choices and also has a direct effect on the level of social and sustainable impact.

Considering that the members of the International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGO) Accountability Charter played a prominent role in initiating the first sector supplement of the Global Reporting Initiative for non-governmental organizations (NGO), the purpose of the paper is to investigate their sustainability reporting (SR) practices in order to evaluate to what extent INGO Charter members comply with this voluntary accountability standard for SR. The empirical analysis is based on a content analysis of sustainability reports. The findings indicate that most of the INGO Charter members are far away from a comprehensive reporting practice. Hence, critical voices could assert that their reporting behavior seems to be more in line with facade building than the idea of providing a comprehensive account. By adapting a multiperspective theoretical discourse about the potential and shortcomings of SR to the NGO context, the study contributes to a field-specific theory-based pluralistic critical evaluation of SR as a major cross-sectoral innovation in voluntary accountability initiatives.

Although civil societies in Central and Eastern Europe are often portrayed as similar, united by a shared communist past, they have developed along increasingly divergent trajectories over the past three decades. This article investigates the current state of civil society in the region and the role the institutional context plays in it. Drawing on historical institutionalism and the process of European integration, we classify the 14 countries under investigation into three distinct groups and analyze data from a survey of more than 350 local civil society experts. We find that, together with domestic governments, international donors and the EU are perceived as the most influential institutional actors for civil society organizations. Their respective influences, however, depend largely on a country’s stage in the EU accession process. Overall, the study provides a differentiated mapping of civil society in this region and a better understanding of how the institutional context relates to a country’s civil society.

This paper examines the determinants of the density of nonprofits registered in the USA by using alternative measures of government services and community conditions to test government failure theory and interdependence theory. Specifically, we examined the relationship between governments and nonprofits in the fields of art, health, and human services, with an emphasis on the level of the provision of public services, the heterogeneous demands of populations, and for-profit service providers. We found that the size of government, measured as government wage and fiscal decentralization, was negatively associated with the density of nonprofits, while government fragmentation was positively related to the density of nonprofits. The heterogeneity of community populations tended to increase nonprofit density. Taken together, therefore, our results offer more support for the government failure theory than the interdependence theory. Also, our findings that for-profit service organizations were positively related to the density of nonprofits call for researchers to pay attention to nonprofit partners and competitors in future studies.

The emergence of new types and new levels of poverty in Sweden has spurred civil society organizations to take a more active role in domestic relief work. Their work is not least directed toward groups of poor with limited access to public welfare in Sweden, in most cases because they are not Swedish citizens. The arrival of groups like the vulnerable EU citizens and undocumented refugees has created a situation where civil society provides emergency relief for groups not eligible for long-term relief from the public sector. A new division of responsibility between civil society and the public sector is therefore being formed, and this division can be explained in terms of rights; the aid organizations are guided by the principles of human rights, while the public sector functions primarily according to social citizenship rights. This article documents the work of the Swedish City Missions, a large aid organization that has become an important actor in poverty relief work in Sweden. A never before conducted survey of 137,000 interventions performed by the Swedish City Missions gives an entirely new insight into the significance of civil society organizations in combating new and old types of poverty in Sweden. Which groups receive which types of aid and what does that tell us about the roles of civil society and the public sector in a rights perspective? The findings show that civil society organizations like the City Missions play a far from marginal role in the Swedish welfare state.

The article analyses 360° video production in international humanitarian aid nonprofit organizations from 2015 to 2019 as 360° video storytelling is one of the latest innovations in organizational digital communication. Through a content analysis and interviews, a specific use of the 360° video format for particular issues or campaigns in order to bring a distant reality to the organization’s audience has been detected. Thus, putting the users in the shoes of “the other” seems to be the objective pursued. NGOs may soon begin to understand long-term interactivity and engagement not just as action and reaction between organization and receiver (almost non-existent to date), but above all as the receiver’s behaviour, which they may strive to orient towards one of the organization’s end goals, depending on the communication strategy set by the organization’s director. With this objective, common to entities from other sectors, they could be moving towards an innovative conceptualization of engagement.

There are various methods for classifying nonprofit organizations (NPOs) according to their field of activity. We report our experiences using two semi-automated methods based on textual data: rule-based classification and machine learning with curated keywords. We use those methods to classify Austrian nonprofit organizations based on the International Classification of Nonprofit Organizations. Those methods can provide a solution to the widespread research problem that quantitative data on the activities of NPOs are needed but not readily available from administrative data, long high-quality texts describing NPOs’ activities are mostly unavailable, and human labor resources are limited. We find that in such a setting, rule-based classification performs about as well as manual human coding in terms of precision and sensitivity, while being much more labor-saving. Hence, we share our insights on how to efficiently implement such a rule-based approach. To address scholars with a background in data analytics as well as those without, we provide non-technical explanations and open-source sample code that is free to use and adapt.

The purpose of the paper is to (i) analyze how different users of social media (Twitter) interact and spread cause-related communication and (ii) explore how people search for cause-related marketing campaigns online, allowing a comparison between individualist and collectivist cultures. A social network analysis was used to map the different types of networks created by online users. A second in-depth study on how online users search for cause-related marketing campaigns used a 5-year analysis. Online users in individualist countries are more engaged with a broader community than those in collectivist countries who focus their attention on a narrower set of CRM messages. These findings are useful insights for companies and charities, which should adopt different strategies depending on the culture.

In this research, we focus on the governance role of the coordinator affiliated to the leading agency in public–nonprofit service networks. We analyze the extent to which different types of coordinators are able to build consensus on a set of network goals in close collaboration with the nonprofit network partners. We explore three network cases, respectively, coordinated by a commissioner, a co-producer and a facilitator. Both network coordinators and respondents from participating nonprofit service agencies are interviewed.In contrast to earlier studies our analysis indicates that, in comparison with a facilitator, a commissioner and a co-producer are better equipped to reach consensus on a set of goals in service networks. The practice of synthesis is considered as very important when establishing consensus in a network.

Islamic welfare organizations are currently going through processes of ‘NGOization’. Drawing on qualitative data from Pakistan, Norway and the UK (2012–2015), this article examines how two Islamic welfare organizations which are embedded in Islamic political movements, become ‘Muslim NGOs’. The NGOization of Islamic charity signifies not only a change in organizational structure and legal status, but also more profound changes in organizational discourse and practice, and in the ways the organizations make claims to legitimacy. To claim legitimacy as providers of aid in changing institutional environments, the organizations draw on both religious and professional sources of authority. By analysing the NGOization of Islamic charity, the paper brings out the importance of normative frameworks in shaping organizational legitimacy and sheds light on the continued significance of both moral and transcendental aspects of the discourses, practices and identities of Muslim NGOs.

The media has a major influence on public opinions and legitimacy for NGOs, which can have a serious impact on the effectiveness of NGOs’ programs. However, media biases often affect the framing of media objects. For instance, western countries are often portrayed negatively by the media of the Muslims countries. This anti-western bias is less prevalent in English-language media when compared to the local languages newspapers as the English-language media generally target the elites who often hold less anti-western opinions than the general population. As NGOs are usually considered a western construct in the Muslim world, I test whether the media’s sensitivity to its consumers’ sentiments extends to the coverage of NGOs by comparing English and local language (Urdu) newspapers in Pakistan. I confirm that Urdu newspapers portray NGOs more negatively than English-language newspapers and are more likely to question NGOs’ effectiveness and accountability.

In the article, we analyse the impact of changing policy environments on the development of the third sector in Europe. Based on the results of systematic comparative research in eight European countries (Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK), we identify commonalities and differences. In a three-step analysis, we examine policy changes, effects on the third sector and responses by third sector organizations (TSOs) in the social domain. Overall, the third sector in Europe has proven resilient. However, not only have public and private funding decreased, the process for acquiring such funding has become more demanding for TSOs, as have requirements to be accountable. There are signs of a proliferation of more market-based, hybrid organizations. Despite this general trend towards marketization, the impact of policy changes varies across Europe with TSOs being better equipped to adapt and survive in countries where collaborative ties between the state and the third sector have traditionally been strong.