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Nonprofit organizations are influenced by multiple institutional logics. However, data and methodological limitations have restricted scholars to classifying organizations solely according to activity-based logics and hindered investigation of alternative logics. This article presents a method for measuring organizational identity—a critical component of the multiple logics framework. To illustrate our method, we focus on religious identity. Using dictionary-based text analysis, we analyze Form 990 data to identify nonprofit organizations that share the same activity-based logic (e.g., education, arts, and health care) but operate with different identity-based logics (religious vs. secular). To demonstrate the value of measuring organizational identity at scale, we compare religiously identified organizations with their secular counterparts. Results suggest there are approximately 670,000 religious and religiously identified organizations in the nonprofit sector and illustrate the importance of operationalizing multiple institutional logics for nonprofit research. Extensions include creating additional dictionaries and large-scale measures of other organizational identities, including race/ethnicity, gender, LGBTQIA+, and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States has long relied on private organizations to provide public services to poor communities. However, while the federal government's support of the civic sector through grants and contracts is well studied, little research investigates how it subsidizes voluntary organizations through national service programs, such as Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). In this article, we assess whether nonprofits that receive VISTA members show higher levels of donations and volunteers than matched nonprofits that did not receive VISTA members in the years following the Great Recession. We find that nonprofits that participated in the VISTA program had higher numbers of volunteers 2 years after participation, suggesting that national service was effective at supporting local organizations and building local civic infrastructure during an economic recovery. We also follow VISTA receiving organizations from 2010 to 2016 in a longitudinal design, finding a robust relationship of VISTA service and volunteering. These findings suggest VISTA is a resource for organizations and invite further research on the relationship between national service and anti-poverty work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking to supplement common economic indicators, politicians and policymakers are increasingly interested in how to measure and improve the subjective well-being of communities. Theories about nonprofit organizations suggest that they represent a potential policy-amenable lever to increase community subjective well-being. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel models with IRS and Twitter data, this study explores whether communities with higher numbers of nonprofits per capita exhibit greater subjective well-being in the form of more expressions of positive emotion, engagement, and relationships. We find associations, robust to sample bias concerns, between most types of nonprofit organizations and decreases in negative emotions, negative sentiments about relationships, and disengagement. We also find an association between nonprofit presence and the proportion of words tweeted in a county that indicate engagement. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of why nonprofit organizations matter for community-level outcomes and how they should be considered an important public policy lever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]