‘Angelic’ View Clouds Approach to Nonprofit Research, Speakers Say

Too many nonprofit scholars are boosters, ignoring the serious problems that mar the nonprofit world, and the organizations that are involved in activities that harm society, says a prominent philanthropy researcher.

David Horton Smith, founder of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, took the opportunity of the group’s annual meeting here in November to chastise its members for ignoring what he called “the dark side of the nonprofit sector.”

“We have the wrong paradigm,” he said. “We think of ourselves as the angelic sector; we can do no wrong.”

And that brand of boosterism, he said, has kept scholars from examining what he described as deviance among conventional organizations — such as the incidence of fraud — and, more important, the organizations that are themselves deviant, such as terrorist groups and cults.

He likened not studying those phenomena to medical researchers not studying disease, and thus gathering no knowledge of how to identify and root out illness.

Putnam Barber, who is on the editorial board of the association’s scholarly journal, however, countered that plenty of research does examine issues of accountability and governance, and does take a critical approach to what may be wrong and not working at nonprofit organizations.

As for studying the real outliers, the deviant groups Mr. Smith points to, he said, may be outside the association’s purview and best left to scholars in other fields, like anthropology or criminology.

“Are we engaged in studying the structured forms of collective action,” said Mr. Barber, the editor of Nonprofit FAQ, a Web guide to nonprofit issues, “or are we studying the phenomena of lowercase ‘c’ collective action that includes all sorts of evils and perversions?”

Researchers who were studying the impact of mandatory community service in high school ended up discovering that President-elect Barack Obama may make a big difference in encouraging people to give and volunteer.

An October survey of 365 students at North Carolina State University, most of whom performed mandatory community service in high school, found that the young people who reported supporting Barack Obama for president were more likely than those who expressed support for John McCain to say that, given the opportunities, they would volunteer at least one hour a week and donate at least $1 a week to a charitable cause.

Richard M. Clerkin, an assistant professor of public administration at North Carolina State, said he and his two fellow researchers added the question about the presidential candidates to their mandatory-service survey because of the overwhelming interest in the election.

“Part of the Obama campaign was a call for civic engagement, civic renewal,” Mr. Clerkin said. “The numbers tell us that may have resonated with some of these folks.”

Francie Ostrower, an associate scholar at the Urban Institute, in Washington, gave a preview at the meeting here of a forthcoming report on a seldom-examined corner of the foundation world — limitedlife foundations, which are grant makers that, instead of operating into perpetuity, have set a date by which they must distribute all their assets.

The report will be based on information extracted from a 2003 study of the attitudes and practices of more than 800 private foundations, 70 of them with so-called sunset provisions. It will also be based on interviews, conducted this year and last, with the leaders of 29 foundations that either are scheduled to shut down at a specific time or have seriously considered doing so.

Ms. Ostrower, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, said the report is expected to challenge some assumptions about limited-life foundations, such as that donors commonly chose a time limit for their grant making to help them focus on specific philanthropic goals. Few limited-life foundations were established for that reason, she said. Instead, she said, sunset provisions exist for a variety of reasons, including motivation as simple as donors not feeling their children or grandchildren would remain interested in the causes they support.

An assumption that does hold, Ms. Ostrower said, is that foundations with a sunset provision tend to adhere closely to the founder’s original intent even after the founder has died.

Whatever the results of the study, though, Ms. Ostrower said foundations of all kinds could benefit from considering a sunset option. Such deliberation, she said, can help grant makers clarify their goals.

Two trends in corporate philanthropy — growing efforts to hire outside organizations to handle grant making and an emphasis on employee volunteering — may speed up in the down economy, a researcher told academics and nonprofit officials at the conference here.

Turning over the distribution of grants and, even, the decision making behind them to intermediary organizations, like United Ways, can save businesses money, said Karabi C. Bezboruah, a lecturer at the University of North Texas. Providing incentives for employees to volunteer, such as paid time off, she said, is also a way for companies to support good works without spending a lot of extra cash.

“Corporations still want to look good and still want to be involved in their communities even when the economy is bad, or maybe even more so when the economy is bad, but they just are more cost conscious,” Ms. Bezboruah said in an interview following a conference session in which she presented findings from her study of corporate giving at 10 Texas companies.

Ms. Bezboruah had done her research before the latest financial upheavals, but she said that much of the same wisdom about corporate philanthropy holds true in good times and bad. One factor that appears to be a constant, she said, is how much giving decisions are influenced by personal connections.

“The lesson there for nonprofit organizations,” she said, “is to develop relationships with people in the corporate world.”