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Donations in social context
Author(s) -
Ressler Robert W.,
Paxton Pamela,
Velasco Kristopher
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
nonprofit management and leadership
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.844
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1542-7854
pISSN - 1048-6682
DOI - 10.1002/nml.21449
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , revenue , internal revenue , public relations , business , service (business) , identity (music) , organizational ecology , marketing , sociology , political science , accounting , social science , geography , physics , archaeology , acoustics
Many nonprofit organizations rely on donations to fund their programs, and a robust literature predicts donations in large‐scale quantitative studies. The focus, however, is almost exclusively on the financial characteristics of the organizations, leaving the social context underexplored. In this article, we theorize how ecological context, organizational identity, and social network ties can shape donations. We use the new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) release of e‐filed nonprofit reporting forms to consider 95,518 501(c)3 nonprofits around 2015. Using lagged regression models, we find that organizations within a more favorable ecological context, those that use appeals to religion, and organizations with more volunteers report more donations. Furthermore, stressing affiliation with a geographic location is associated with more donations only under certain ecological conditions. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for nonprofit organizations and social theories regarding what influences donations to organizations.