Management and Governance of Nonprofit Organizations

"'I actually don't believe any organization should exist just for the sake of its own self, just for the sake of existing. But rather, what is it doing? What is its mission? What is its service to the community?' This comment was made by an associate artistic director at one of the 25 performing arts organizations in The Wallace Foundation's Building Audiences for Sustainability (BAS) initiative. As the comment reflects, sustainability per se should not be an end for nonprofit organizations, but rather a means for pursuing mission-related goals. That is why, as we started our University of Texas at Austin research evaluation of the multi-year audience-building initiative, we asked leaders and staff at participating organizations why they believe it is important that their organizations continue.

That was in 2016.1 The initiative ended in 2019. Within months performing arts organizations would face dramatically altered circumstances. The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered performances around the country and protests against racial injustice challenged large established arts institutions to reform their practices in the interest of greater diversity, equity, and inclusion.2 If anything, these circumstances have only increased the relevance and urgency of questions about organizational value and sustainability. Thus, it seems like an opportune moment to ask where these organizations were in their thinking before the world changed so dramatically. As we shall see, their comments surfaced challenges, tensions, and decisions about organizational value that go beyond their individual organizations and are relevant to large, established nonprofit arts organizations more broadly.3

Virtually everyone interviewed believed it was important that their organizations continue, offering passionate accounts of the value of the arts, their art forms, and their organizations.4 Noteworthy, however, was that a substantial portion also believed that changes were needed to remain important. This change involved rethinking the organization's relationship with the community. Encapsulating this view, the general director of one opera company said, "We have to reinvent ourselves, never to lose our focus on being a world-class opera company, but to understand that to be truly relevant to a city like [ours] . . . we have to change."

Today, the scope, urgency, and the level of calls for change have amplified. And, it must be said, the BAS initiative itself, which awarded almost $41 million to this group of relatively affluent and virtually entirely white-led group of organizations, would be questioned today as exemplifying inequities in philanthropic support that favor such organizations at the expense of smaller institutions and those founded and led by people of color.5 Nonetheless, these institutions do exist and continue to command substantial resources. In our final round of interviews, we are asking BAS participants about the impact of both the pandemic and calls for equity, diversity, and inclusion on their thinking, plans, and activities. We are also revisiting the question of why they believe it is important that their organizations continue to exist. At this point, in this short interim brief, we share their comments from an earlier time in the spirit of contributing to conversations and questions about future directions for such organizations."

How can computational social science (CSS) methods be applied in nonprofit and philanthropic studies? This paper summarizes and explains a range of relevant CSS methods from a research design perspective and highlights key applications in our field. We define CSS as a set of computationally intensive empirical methods for data management, concept representation, data analysis, and visualization. What makes the computational methods "social" is that the purpose of using these methods is to serve quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods social science research, such that theorization can have a solid ground. We illustrate the promise of CSS in our field by using it to construct the largest and most comprehensive database of scholarly references in our field, the Knowledge Infrastructure of Nonprofit and Philanthropic Studies (KINPS). Furthermore, we show that through the application of CSS in constructing and analyzing KINPS, we can better understand and facilitate the intellectual growth of our field. We conclude the article with cautions for using CSS and suggestions for future studies implementing CSS and KINPS.

This essay is the first in a series of publications to be released as part of a study of the audience-building efforts of the 25 performing arts organizations in The Wallace Foundation's $52 million Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative. The initiative awarded grants to the organizations to try to engage new audiences while retaining existing ones and to see whether these audience-building efforts contribute to organizations' financial health. The foundation then commissioned and funded The University of Texas at Austin to conduct an independent evaluation of these audience-building efforts. The lead author of this essay is the study's principal investigator. Future publications will present findings from this research. This report reviews an extensive amount of literature and presents its major themes and arguments, identifies gaps in the literature, and suggests areas for future research to address unanswered questions. We provide extensive references for the reader who wishes to pursue individual publications in greater depth. In the case of the audience-building literature we found many relevant publications but not acohesive line of inquiry whose studies reference and build upon one another. In the case of financial health, we found so little literature specifically on the performing arts that we considered other potentially relevant literature on nonprofit financial health more generally. With respect to the relationship between audience building and financial sustainability, we found virtually no literature.