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Corporate volunteering (CV) is an increasingly common type of nonprofit-business collaboration and can take various forms, and its benefits for the business partner are well studied. The benefits for the nonprofit partner, however, are less evident and often questioned. This study investigates why nonprofits engage in and how they make sense of CV collaborations, building on the concepts of sensemaking and cognitive frames. Drawing on interviews with staff in nonprofit organizations, we reveal that decisions about CV collaborations usually go beyond the resources acquired through CV itself. We identify three different CV frames and show how they lead to different types of partnerships, hereby challenging the assumption that more integrative partnerships are superior to philanthropic ones. Our results show that depending on the frame used, different perceptions of the distribution of power between the nonprofit and the business partner exist, addressing the crucial role of how nonprofit organizations position themselves in such partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research addressing the relation between income and donations as a proportion of income has revealed predominantly inconsistent results. In this article, we argue that this can partly be explained by the great variance of methodological approaches. Providing a literature review covering 26 studies, we systematically identify how methodological issues such as data, variables, and methods have affected former findings. In addition, we apply different methodological approaches to Austrian income tax data (n = 20,000), demonstrating how different methods lead to a variation in results. Overall, we show that existing studies are hardly comparable as their designs vary strongly. We point out that it is particularly important to use samples with sufficient cases of all income groups and methods that adequately account for the non-linear relation between the two variables, not restricting it to a U-shape. Our findings enable a better understanding and interpretation of diverging findings in philanthropic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies demonstrate the effectiveness of university-based community service programs on students' personal, social, ethical, and academic domains. These effects depend on both, the characteristics of students enrolled and the characteristics of the programs, for instance whether they are voluntary or mandatory. Our study investigates whether effects of voluntary service programs are indeed caused by the service experience or by prior self-selection. Using data from a pre–post quasi-experimental design conducted at a public university in Europe and taking students' socioeconomic background into account, our findings on self-efficacy, generalized trust, empathic concern, and attributions for poverty show that there are no participation effects. Instead, students who join in community service differ significantly from nonparticipants with regard to almost all investigated domains a priori, indicating strong self-selection. Our results underline the importance of structured group reflection, most notably with regard to attitude-related topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to contribute to the long-standing discussion about nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) dependence on public funding and its consequences on their advocacy role in modern societies. Drawing on resource dependence theory and data from a quantitative survey, the study investigates the impact of public funding and its extent on nonprofit engagement in advocacy. Traditionally, scholars have cautioned that NPOs reliant on public sources will hesitate to pursue political objectives and to engage in advocacy work. Yet, empirical findings are strikingly inconsistent. One of the reasons for these ambiguous findings may be the way advocacy is measured. To address this issue, we apply two different approaches to evaluate NPO engagement. Both sets of findings from our multivariate analyses of Austrian NPOs suggest that public funding does not have a negative impact on advocacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]