Research on Charities Falls Short

Leaders of non-profit groups point to work they can’t use

Mary Jo Buchanan, who runs a New Jersey charity that provides social services to the poor, is searching for ways to cope with new trends that could revolutionize how her organization operates.

Ms. Buchanan, executive director of Family Service of Morris County, says she needs more than how-to manuals as she figures out how to deal with threats to the organization’s financing from cuts in government aid, growing demand for services, and new insurance-reimbursement rules that place strict limits on the mental-health counseling that the charity provides. What she wants is rigorous, unbiased academic research that examines how overburdened social-service organizations have found ways to do more with fewer resources.

But, she says, she has found little academic research that deals with her greatest needs — or is written in a way that is easy to understand. Such research, she says, is “absolutely necessary to coherently plan for the future so that we’re meeting the needs of the community and not just out there spinning our wheels.”

Her desire for help underscores one of the great challenges facing scholars who specialize in research on non-profit, philanthropic, and volunteer activities. Since its beginnings in the early 1970s, the academic arena has grown substantially, but it produces research that is often so esoteric or narrowly focused that people who run non-profit organizations say they rarely can use it.

That is hardly the only shortcoming, scholars in the field as well as many charity and foundation leaders say. Research on non-profit organizations still has miles to go before its scope and quality match the social and economic significance of the non-profit world itself, and it has not attracted much prestige or money at colleges and universities, they say.

Key issues on giving, fund raising, volunteerism, religiosity, and the role of non-profit organizations in public life remain poorly understood. Philanthropic trends among minorities, baby boomers, and the young multimillionaires of Silicon Valley cry for empirical examination. The most basic statistical data on charitable work in the states is thin and uneven, many researchers and charity officials say.

Even so, for an academic niche that barely existed 25 years ago, non-profit scholarship has made some big strides. At least 76 colleges and universities have a graduate concentration of three or more courses in management of non-profit organizations, up from 17 in 1990, according to a study by Seton Hall University. An additional 43 schools offer one or two graduate courses in non-profit management.

Several dozen colleges and universities have separate centers that specialize in the study of philanthropy. One of the oldest, the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, marks its 10th anniversary this month. Meanwhile, Harvard University is entering the field with a new center for non-profit studies, created in part by a $10-million private gift.

The pool of non-profit scholars is growing, too. Membership in the 26-year-old Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, known as ARNOVA, has risen 78 per cent in just three years to 825 people, most of them university scholars from the United States, though a growing number are foreign scholars, researchers who work for non-profit organizations, and non-profit managers and leaders. When the group holds its annual meeting next week in Indianapolis, some 250 research papers will be presented, up from 65 papers in 1990.

Much of the growth has been fueled by interest among scholars from economics, the social sciences, and other disciplines who increasingly recognize the important role the non-profit world plays in commerce, government, and many other facets of society.

Another reason for the growth has been the Aspen Institute’s Nonprofit Sector Research Fund. It has provided $5.7-million to 235 scholarly projects since it was started in 1991 with the help of several national foundations that were concerned about both the paucity and the poor quality of research.

This year Aspen will hand out about $1-million in grants, paid for by such big benefactors as the Ford, Charles Stewart Mott, Kellogg, Carnegie, Rockefeller Brothers, and James Irvine Foundations.

Even with the creation of the Aspen fund, however, scholars say attracting money for non-profit research has been hard. The Aspen fund has received 1,750 grant requests totaling about $64-million over its lifetime. Many foundations, corporations, and individual donors don’t see non-profit research as a cause that needs support.

“Research is a tough sell to foundations,” says Alan J. Abramson, director of the Aspen fund. “They want to fund action projects. And research into the non-profit sector is a tougher sell. Most want to do research on a particular issue such as health, poverty, or the arts.”

Even though money has been tight, scholars are gaining some ground in the effort to draw a map of the non-profit world. The Johns Hopkins University is working on a major study of non-profit groups worldwide, and the Urban Institute is working on an extensive analysis of charity informational tax returns.

Studies conducted by Independent Sector, a national coalition of charities and foundations, have shown that about three-quarters of U.S. non-profit groups lack enough income — $25,000 — to meet federal requirements that they file an informational tax return with the Internal Revenue Service.

That knowledge, says Virginia A. Hodgkinson, who oversaw Independent Sector’s research for 15 years, has helped keep policy makers from imposing new regulations on small non-profit groups. It also has induced scholars to begin studying the social impact of the thousands of charities and community groups too small to file with the government, says Ms. Hodgkinson, now a research professor at Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute.

Still, many non-profit experts say a big knowledge gap persists — especially in areas involving governmental regulation of non-profit groups.

“There’s a whole bunch of things on which there’s been little or no research,” says Kirke Wilson, executive director of the Rosenberg Foundation in San Francisco.

Mr. Wilson points, for example, to efforts by Rep. Ernest J. Istook, Jr., Republican of Oklahoma, in recent years to prohibit non-profit groups that receive federal money from conducting advocacy efforts.

Have non-profit organizations abused the practice of lobbying, or grossly underused it, Mr. Wilson asks rhetorically. “We just don’t know,” he says.

And should government regulators be concerned about the takeovers of non-profit hospitals by for-profit medical companies?

“Almost any public-policy issue related to non-profits raises questions for which there is not adequate research,” he says.

Public policy is not the only glaring gap. Many people are frustrated by the lack of research on ethnic and racial giving patterns. Understanding black, Hispanic, and Asian-American philanthropy is important because of the growing presence of those groups in the U.S. demographic mix.

“The research community is continuing to grapple with the fact that the United States has a diverse history of people who have very different cultural approaches to giving,” says Emmett D. Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation and a long-time scholar of black philanthropy.

ARNOVA, the association of non-profit researchers, hopes that by attracting more minorities to the field, it will become more diverse in its scholarly activities. This summer, it started a multifaceted effort to increase participation by black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and other minority scholars in the group. “This is something we have been working on for the last three to five years, but our efforts have not been as successful as we would have liked,” says Anita H. Plotinsky, the organization’s executive director. “Every board member has made a personal commitment to work on this.”

While the breadth and diversity of research is one issue facing non-profit scholars, another is the usefulness of their work to practitioners in the field. A study of available research on non-profit management and leadership by the Applied Research and Development Institute International in Denver found a “substantial amount” of scholarly research — nearly 4,000 reports over a six-year period, says Carol L. Barbeito, president of the organization. But the study, paid for by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, also found a “disjuncture” between scholars and non-profit leaders who are potential users of the research, Ms. Barbeito says.

“People who were potential end users often weren’t involved in identifying research questions,” she says. “They had trouble finding the research once it was done, and then when they did get it, it was hard for them to apply.”

With additional grants from the Johnson and Rockefeller Brothers Foundations, the Colorado group has identified three ways to try to close the gap between researchers and non-profit workers. It has developed a model research method that involves non-profit managers right from the start of an academic project. It also believes that multimedia efforts to make research accessible are necessary, since the printed page is not always the best way to get across the results of a scholar’s work. And it believes that distribution of research to non-profit groups must become a routine part of the scholarly process. The institute is now seeking grants so it can carry out those steps.

The Center for Public Service at Seton Hall University already is taking the need for nuts-and-bolts information to heart. The center’s scholars and graduate students provide pro bono management help to New Jersey-area non-profit groups that pass a competitive selection process. And it puts out a newsletter through its Nonprofit Sector Resource Institute of New Jersey that summarizes scholarly articles in plain language for charity leaders who may not understand academic lingo.

Demand for the newsletter has been increasing, says Naomi Bailin Wish, director of the center. Titled “The Nonprofit Connection: Bridging Research & Practice,” the eight-page publication goes to 6,000 New Jersey-area non-profit organizations twice a year as well as to numerous professional organizations and philanthropic boards. And the Nonprofit Management Development Center at La Salle University in Philadelphia is reproducing articles from the Seton Hall newsletter for several thousand charity leaders.

What non-profit managers want, Ms. Wish suggests, is not reams of statistics or high-minded academic jargon, but information to solve problems. “You have the people who are really getting their hands dirty as leaders and managers of non-profit community-based organizations. What do they have time for? How can they use the research?”

To deal with that need, the newsletter always includes a section on the relevance of the research to day-to-day life at a charity, plus a list of resources and references for readers.

The process has made it clear that the values in academe do not necessarily translate so well into charity work. For instance, a research paper on non-profit governance that won a prestigious academic prize was almost impossible to put into simple English, says Roseanne M. Mirabella, the newsletter’s editor. While the subject matter was “potentially useful” to people in the field, Ms. Mirabella says, the paper was “real esoteric, with tons and tons of quantitative analysis.”

Of course, many academics say that producing research that is of immediate use to non-profit managers cannot — and should not — be the goal of every scholar or academic program. Just as in medicine or economics, a mix of practical and theoretical approaches is best, they say.

Then, too, many scholars are sensitive to the needs of rank-and-file practitioners but are hobbled by forces that shape much of academe. Scholars point out that emerging disciplines like non-profit studies always have a long road to travel to gain respect among university administrators and tenure committees.

“We’re talking about a very young field of research,” says Michael O’Neill, director of the Institute for Nonprofit Organization Management at the University of San Francisco and president of the association of non-profit researchers.

Still, non-profit research “is not seen as an important issue in the academy,” says Mr. Abramson of the Aspen Institute. One reason, he suspects, is that not enough data has been collected to demonstrate the significant role of non-profit groups in society. Scholars have tended to see only government and business as influential social forces, he says.

“We’ve tried to get more people interested in the subject, and it’s a challenge,” says Mr. Abramson. He says he has hoped that by emphasizing topics like governments’ efforts to pass on more social-welfare duties and the effects of tax-code changes on philanthropy, he might attract new scholars. But, he says, “there just aren’t that many university-based researchers who are interested.”

Even in places where scholarly interest is keen, sustaining a program in non-profit studies can be difficult. Peter Dobkin Hall, acting director of the 20-year-old Program on Non-Profit Organizations at Yale University, says many of the freestanding centers and programs around the country sprang from a mistaken belief that philanthropic studies would become a separate academic discipline, like economics and political science. But, he says, non-profit studies have attracted little financial support or prestige in academe.

Trying to keep the field separate will mean relying more and more on foundations and charities for money, thereby creating the perception — if not the reality — that the non-profit world controls the direction of research, Mr. Hall contends. Meanwhile, scholars in established disciplines are increasingly producing cutting-edge non-profit research untainted by financial ties to the philanthropic arena, he says.

Thus, he argues, the key to insuring survival and credibility for non-profit scholarship is to join forces with more established disciplines. That’s what his program at Yale is doing.

It is moving under the wing of the university’s prestigious divinity school, Mr. Hall says, where its scope will expand to include study of faith-based charitable work and values affecting business, public policy, and international relations.

Says Mr. Hall, “We’re going to carry a broad portfolio.”