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While the number of think tanks active in American politics has more than quadrupled since the 1970s, their influence has not expanded proportionally. Instead, the known ideological proclivities of many, especially newer think tanks with their aggressive efforts to obtain high profiles, have come to undermine the credibility with which experts and expertise are generally viewed by public officials. This book explains this paradox. The analysis is based on 135 in-depth interviews with officials at think tanks and those in the policy making and funding organizations that draw upon and support their work. The book reports on results from a survey of congressional staff and journalists and detailed case studies of the role of experts in health care and telecommunications reform debates in the 1990s and tax reduction in 2001.

After Haiti's 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake,Killing with Kindnessanalyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich enthnographic comparisons of two Haitian women's NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs' roles as intermediaries in \"gluing\" the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain-a process Schuller calls \"trickle-down imperialism.\"

This article provides an overview of the key research findings and core concepts on the topic of organizational networks. The primary focus is on goal-directed \"whole\" service delivery networks, which are prevalent in the public and nonprofit sectors. The findings and ideas presented are especially salient for helping public managers build, maintain, operate, and govern multiorganizational networks in ways that will enhance their effectiveness. Because research and theory on networks extend well beyond the boundanes of public management and administration, the authors draw on thinking from a number of fields, providing a broad understanding of public networks and network functioning. The article is intended to provide usable information on networks for both practitioners and students, as well as to suggest directions for future research for the many public management scholars who now study organizational networks.

Direct marketing, as an avenue for fundraising, provides nonprofit organizations with the ability to fulfill their missions and donors the opportunity to support a worthy cause. There are concerns, however, when sophisticated marketing practices target potentially at-risk consumers. Demographic studies clearly show that the percentage of elderly Americans, aged 65 and over, is rising with a corollary increase in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. These facts suggest this may be a group whose defining characteristics make them especially vulnerable. This exploratory study identifies and qualifies persuasive tactics used by several linked nonprofit organizations targeting one elderly Alzheimer’s victim over a 14-month period. The carefully designed direct mail solicitations utilize appeals that engender low elaboration likelihood and peripheral route processing. In addition, there is some evidence that even those appeals that might encourage high elaboration likelihood become heuristic cues for individuals with cognitive decrease. Taken together, the incorporation of multiple tactics within each solicitation, an approach referred to here as shotgunning, may have significant implications for future research and practice in communication, ethics, and public policy.

In the early 1980s the tenant leaders of the New Orleans St. Thomas public housing development and their activist allies were militant, uncompromising defenders of the city’s public housing communities. Yet ten years later these same leaders became actively involved in a planning effort to privatize and downsize their community—an effort that would drastically reduce the number of affordable apartments. What happened? John Arena—a longtime community and labor activist in New Orleans—explores this drastic change in Driven from New Orleans , exposing the social disaster visited on the city’s black urban poor long before the natural disaster of Katrina magnified their plight. Arena argues that the key to understanding New Orleans’s public housing transformation from public to private is the co-optation of grassroots activists into a government and foundation-funded nonprofit complex. He shows how the nonprofit model created new political allegiances and financial benefits for activists, moving them into a strategy of insider negotiations that put the profit-making agenda of real estate interests above the material needs of black public housing residents. In their turn, white developers and the city’s black political elite embraced this newfound political “realism” because it legitimized the regressive policies of removing poor people and massively downsizing public housing, all in the guise of creating a new racially integrated, “mixed-income” community. In tracing how this shift occurred, Driven from New Orleans reveals the true nature, and the true cost, of reforms promoted by an alliance of a neoliberal government, nonprofits, community activists, and powerful real estate interests.

The federal government encourages public support for charitable activities by allowing people to deduct donations to tax-exempt organizations on their income tax returns. Tax-exempt hospitals are major beneficiaries of this policy because it encourages donations to the hospitals while shielding them from federal and state tax liability. In exchange, these hospitals must engage in community benefit activities, such as providing care to indigent patients and participating in Medicaid. The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the value of the nonprofit hospital tax exemption at $12.6 billion in 2002-a number that included forgone taxes, public contributions, and the value of tax-exempt bond financing. In this article we estimate that the size of the exemption reached $24.6 billion in 2011. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) brings a new focus on community benefit activities by requiring tax-exempt hospitals to engage in communitywide planning efforts to improve community health. The magnitude of the tax exemption, coupled with ACA reforms, underscores the public's interest not only in community benefit spending generally but also in the extent to which nonprofit hospitals allocate funds for community benefit expenditures that improve the overall health of their communities.

Both theory and recent research evidence suggest that a corporation's socially responsible behavior can positively affect consumers' attitudes toward the corporation. The effect occurs both directly and indirectly through the behavior's effect on customer-corporation identification. The authors report the results of four studies designed to replicate and extend these findings. Using a field survey design, Study 1 provides evidence that perceived corporate social responsibility affects not only customer purchase behavior through customer-corporate identification but also customer donations to corporate-supported nonprofit organizations. Using experimental designs, Studies 2 and 3 replicate and extend the Study 1 findings by providing additional evidence for the mediating role of customer-corporate identification on the relationship between corporate social responsibility and customer donations. However, the combined results of Studies 2 and 3 also show that because of a \"perceived opportunity to do good\" by supporting a company that is changing its ways, consumers are more likely to donate to a corporate-supported nonprofit when the corporation has a weaker historical record of socially responsible behavior. Finally, Study 4 tests the relationship between the nonprofit domain and the domain of the corporation's socially responsible behavior as a boundary condition for this effect.

Organizations in the public domain must be of value for the citizen, being a tenant, client, patient, student, etc. Foundations, corporations, associations, they all have the intention to make social profit and avoid financial loss. What is the real value and how do these organizations contribute? Social profit and value, that is where this book is about. We present a new method to visualize and assess this profit. The Social Profit Canvas aims to empower two things: increase result and impact, and effect a change towards a ‘bottom-up-approach’. This book will lead and support professionals in the sector to achieve these goals. Marc Vermeulen and Anke Vroomen describe the developments in the public domain and explore the use of the Social Profit Canvas model, including measuring and decision making in respect of public value. The Social Profit Canvas is developed together with Mark Wolbert and Jaap Hoenderdos from WHISE (company for social profit creation) based on their practical experience combined with the scientific knowledge of TIAS (School for Business and Society).

Large commercial publishers sell bundled online subscriptions to their entire list of academic journals at prices significantly lower than the sum of their á la carte prices. Bundle prices differ drastically between institutions, but they are not publicly posted. The data that we have collected enable us to compare the bundle prices charged by commercial publishers with those of nonprofit societies and to examine the types of price discrimination practiced by commercial and nonprofit journal publishers. This information is of interest to economists who study monopolist pricing, librarians interested in making efficient use of library budgets, and scholars who are interested in the availability of the work that they publish.

Cities across the country rely on nonprofit organizations to provide quality services and effective campaigns that will benefit individuals, families, and communities. Reliable men and women are placed in leadership roles within these organizations, but are they prepared to lead? Dr. Troy Washington worked with and studied the leadership of Peacemaker Social Services under Gary Bellamy II, which provided him with insight into this unique line of work. With this in mind, Dr. Washington wrote Beyond the Boardroom: Examining the Concepts of an Effective Leader in a Culturally Conscious, Community-based Nonprofit Organization as a guide for anyone seeking leadership advice related to nonprofit organizations. From directors to team members, everyone makes up an important part of the overall organization. While there may not be a single definition of a leader, there are qualities that stand out among those with true leadership skills. Dr. Washington's hope is that by inspiring leaders, they will use their roles to change the lives of those around them, for the better.