Nonprofit organizations across the country are faced with a leadership crisis due to unprecedented demographic changes and challenges. The en masse retirement of the baby boomers leaves leadership positions in nonprofit organizations vacant and vulnerable. This study uses discourse analysis and dialectical theory to compare and contrast the leadership succession processes in two Texas-based nonprofit organizations. Both organizations have comparable missions, religious backgrounds, and annual budgets. In addition, the two organizations share similar structures in terms of board of directors, board chair, and executive director (ED) dynamics. This research is a descriptive comparative case study. The specific purpose of this study is to examine how various board members, including the board chair and the incumbent ED, construct the leadership succession process through their discursive interactions and strategies. This study demonstrates that leadership succession in nonprofits is a convoluted process enacted discursively by conflicting or collaborating key organizational actors huddled around various leadership nuclei. These nuclei include, in various combinations, the EDs, board chairs, vice-chairs, and even spouses of some of these actors. The leadership nuclei morph over time, based on the management of dialectical tensions experienced across four stages in the succession process: presuccession, during succession A and B, and post-succession. This research contributes to the larger body of leadership succession knowledge in multiple ways. First, this study reveals that leadership is an amorphous and dynamic concept contested among organizational actors across time. Second, the study highlights the architectonic role of discourse in the leadership succession process. The succession process is enacted through the key organizational actors' discursive exchanges. Third, this research points to three types of dialectical tensions underlying the actors' discursive interactions: individual-centered dialectics ("staying/leaving"), relation-centered dialectics ("blaming/absolving," "freedom/control," and "cooperation/competition"), and organization-centered dialectics ("change/stability"). Next, this study demonstrates that organizational or individual crisis prompts the succession process, and that change, conflict, goals, and deadlines grow out of the succession process and not the other way around. Finally, this study contributes specifically to the research area of small nonprofit organizations. There is a paucity of research examining the succession process in small nonprofits, and this study addresses this need.

The political engagement of citizens with their democratic government is fraught with difficulties of inertia, cynicism, lack of knowledge, access and efficacy. This research attempts to address questions of how people occupying a lower socio-economic status (SES) classification might improve their engagement. The research question is, "The motivators and the motivated: what mechanisms do non-profit organizations use to motivate individuals to become politically engaged, and, do they work?" Through a qualitative exploratory case study of five human social-serving nonprofit agencies, and capitalizing on the scholarship of other political scientists, five criteria predictive of outcomes for engagement efforts by agency staff attempting to assist their clients to express their voice in their own governance is presented. The findings demonstrate that effective recruitment or encouragement of clients, coupled with the provision of education and skills, the use of "bridging" social capital, capitalization on client's rational particularistic self-interest and the presence of an effective agency leader or internal organizational entrepreneur may combine to produce engagement on the part of clients within lower SES classifications. Additionally, the strengths of the exploratory case study method resulted in at least six potential future research questions. As with any research, there are study limitations, and this is no exception. However, some useful broad policy recommendations are also provided. / Political Science

This phenomenological study investigates the stories of ten committed, regional environmental non-profit (ENP) professionals who were environmental studies program (ESP) undergraduates, exploring what sustains them in their work, with a focus on the role their undergraduate academic and extracurricular experiences play in supporting their commitment. Financial hardships, public valuation of environmental work, the need to perform multiple roles within the organization, complexities in ecological practice, the associated complexities in human interactions, and a slow timeline for change were the major challenges reported by the participants in their work with regional ENPs. Despite challenges, they persist in their work, often feeling called to the work and prompted by a desire for ethical accord between their personal values and professional lives. Participants describe their academic programs as helping them understand the nature and scale of the environmental challenges. Study abroad, field research, internships, and community-based class projects were all mentioned as academic experiences that allowed them to explore their identities as environmentalists and develop inter and intrapersonal skills. Involvement in student clubs and organizations also provided opportunities for identity development and inter and intrapersonal skill building. Outdoor experiences provided participants with opportunities to develop a sense of place, influencing their future decisions about where to live and work. Recommendations for ESPs, drawn from the research, include that funding for study abroad programs and field research should be made available to ensure all can access these experiences. Also recommended is having academic courses with a range of levels of activism, coupled with a range of class and club offerings on campus, which allows students to choose their level of engagement. Given attachments to place formed during the undergraduate years, and the subsequent desire for graduates to remain in those places, organizations interested in strengthening the environmental movement in particular regions could do so by increasing the strength of ESP offerings in those regions. In addition, once in the job, continued learning was vital in sustaining participants in their work; greater awareness of, and access to professional development is needed. Mentoring offers another avenue for supporting on-going learning. These regional ENP professionals are success stories, having persisted – even thrived – in a difficult profession. Despite the difficulties, they maintain generally positive personal and professional outlooks. Understanding their stories provides data about what can to be done to help sustain the existing leadership and improve the preparation of the future regional ENP leadership.

Nonprofit organizations face a unique challenge in communicating their messages in a marketing saturated world. The author of this research studied how nonprofit organizations used fear, disgust and empathy in their marketing campaigns to see if the use of these emotions would have an effect on six different factors. The results of this study showed how the use of distress can be used to amplify the feelings people have when they see images that contain both fear and disgust.

Researchers have suggested that social networking sites are especially suited to creating a two-way communication with audiences as described by Kent & Taylor’s dialogic communication theory. However, researchers have also shown that most organizations are failing to actually create this type of dialogue with their followers on SNS. This leads to the question: why are organizations failing to realize this potential? In this study, I consider one possible reason: that organizations are following advice offered online by self-appointed “experts” on SNS strategy and that advice is not effective. I performed a content analysis of 29 websites that promise easy tips to increase social media engagement, identified by their placement at the top of Google search listings, then tested some of the most common advice from these sites on the Facebook and Twitter pages of a group of state-level advocacy organizations to see whether that advice is effective in increasing engagement or overall reach. I found many sites advising organizations to interact with followers, create engaging content and to include visual elements in posts. However, the recommendations were often hedged with limitations, or backed up by unreliable statistics or anecdotal evidence. My own experiment showed that using a call to action increased engagement on Twitter and including a photo increased reach on Facebook, but no other test variable had an effect on impressions, reach or engagement on either site. This suggests that the advice offered online is not reliable, and organizations may fail to create dialogic communication with their followers because they are relying on faulty advice to build their SNS strategies.

Thesis advisor: Will Attwood-Charles / Immigration policy has undoubtedly taken a forefront spot in the national dialogue in our contemporary political moment. However, there is considerable disagreement among and within political parties about how to address this issue. This paper seeks to better understand the priorities of immigrant rights activists in the U.S. by executing case studies on 11 immigrant rights organizations. I explore which framing strategies each group uses to push for its goals and theorize about how these social movement organizations (SMOs) arrive at the strategic frames that they do. Through discourse analysis and coding of interviews, websites, and other media sources, I conclude that the most relevant factors in determining what frame a group arrives at are its external resource environment and how professionalized the organization is. There is additional evidence to suggest that the political opportunity structure, salience of a previously successful ‘master frame,’ and the age of leaders also affect framing processes. Finally, my data does not suggest that being immigrant-led versus led by non-immigrant ‘allies’ directly affects an SMOs’ framing strategies, but it does affect the external resource environment from which it is able to draw. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: International Studies.

Informal or non-contractual partnerships between nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and government entities are becoming more common in America, opening up new possibilities for NPOs to function as equal partners in the decision-making process and implementation of community services. The problem concerns the challenges that NPOs face in achieving equal partner status with their local government counterpart, a problem which has received limited attention in research. The purpose of this study was to explore the dynamics behind successful informal partnerships between NPOs and local governments, translating into effective and efficient service delivery. The theoretical framework was based on Davis's stewardship theory and Schelling's game theory. The research questions examined the dynamics that enable the NPO and government partnerships to be successful, specifically the development and sustainment of trust, power balance, open and transparent communication, and level and frequency of interactions. This qualitative case study included interviews with nonprofit executives (n = 5), recruited through a pre-interview questionnaire, and review of NPO published documents describing the informal partnerships. The data were coded and analyzed by creating mind maps. Findings revealed that the actions and decisions of the NPOs and local governments reflected a shared mission and desire to achieve positive social change. The results indicate that NPOs and local governments may function as equal partners if certain dynamics are present such as trust, transparent communication, influence, and goal alignment. The implications for social change include establishing successful models of informal partnerships between NPOs and local governments that impact the social and economic well-being of communities.

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The fight against poverty in the United States has existed since the inception of the country. Each successive generation has had their own unique view on the causes of poverty and the use of institutions to suppress it. This dissertation focuses on institutions helping the poor during the Progressive Era from 1900 to 1930. During this time period poverty relief fundamentally evolved from private charities providing the bulk of relief efforts to government agencies becoming the more important source of aid.Research into poverty relief for this time period has been deficient mostly from a lack of quality data. To further the literature, I have created a unique data set that provides information about both governmental and private relief efforts throughout the era. The first chapter of the dissertation focuses on quantitatively and qualitatively documenting the evolution of institutions from 1900 to 1930 in Massachusetts. Particular emphasis is on how the public's changing attitudes towards the poor altered the institutions used to provide relief. The second chapter studies the effects of government spending on private spending. I highlight how nonprofit managers' behavior would lead them to reduce spending when the government became the first avenue of support for the poor. The third chapter tests assumptions made in the second chapter about nonprofit managerial behavior. Unfortunately, data from 1900 to 1930 does not have the quality to answer these questions. Therefore, I use a similar data set from 1998 to 2003 to test how nonprofit managers adjust their spending, program service revenue, and savings to the business cycle.

The model of Entrepreneurial Orientation has frequently been used as a way to analyze the entrepreneurial behavior of organizations. Although the model has been adopted across different context, it has rarely been adapted to these: One such context is nonprofits. As nonprofits operate under other circumstances, we argue that the five dimensions of innovativeness, risk-taking, proactiveness, competitive aggressiveness, and autonomy may not account for all entrepreneurial activity in these organizations. With the largest body of nonprofits in Sweden being sports, a single case study with semi-structured interviews of members in Judo associations were conducted to answer the two research questions: (1) Which dimensions of EO can be found within nonprofits? and (2) Why do entrepreneurial behavior differ between for-profits and nonprofits? By implementing the study of Morris, Webb and Franklin (2011) of motivation, processes, and outcomes we identified what processes can be translated into dimensions, as well as what the motivation behind these are. By analyzing our empirical data we were able to answer our questions in the following way. In nonprofits, the dimensions of innovativeness, internal proactiveness, collaboration, lobbying, and autonomy were identified, indicating that the EO model does indeed need to be adapted for nonprofits. The reason for why these dimensions occurred is mainly due to difference in the motivation of nonprofits. We find that the nonprofits aim to fulfill external goals, by serving a social purpose to stakeholders and growth. This means that nonprofits are not as focused on other players in the market, which impacts on their entrepreneurial behavior.