Small nonprofit organizations are faced with limited resources and budgets for setting and reaching their goals. Some are nevertheless able to mitigate these challenges and achieve success. This thesis examines how this can be done. Organizations with excellent public relations programs have been found to be successful in achieving their goals (Grunig et al., 2002). Through the lens of the excellence model, this thesis analyzes, using in depth, semi-structured interview data, how senior managers of seven successful small nonprofits account for their success and address challenges as well as how their practices reflect the excellence model. This thesis does not test the excellence model in the context of small nonprofits, but rather attempts to establish recommendations for communication and PR success for small nonprofits based on what is learned from a small group of successful organizations.

Nonprofit organizations have become a necessary staple in the lives of people and communities experiencing poverty. Many of these organizations provide services that they think their communities need. The solutions and services these organizations provide are incumbent on what the organizations think causes poverty. Although the motivations behind these organizations have good intentions, their approach to poverty could further jeopardize people and communities by not providing proper or necessary services that have the ability to help people get out of poverty. To explore how organizational values and perspectives on poverty are operationalized, I examined one nonprofit grassroots organization in Tampa Heights, Tampa, Florida. I applied the following four theories of poverty: individual, cultural, political-economic, and geographic to explain how participants discussed poverty in Tampa Heights. Interviews revealed that while many participants subscribed to multiple theories of poverty, each participant held one dominant view. This finding, among others, exposed the complexities of how individuals understand poverty as well as how nonprofit organizations approach these multifaceted issues. Thus, indicating the need for a clearer explanation of how and why people use these theories or combinations of theories to explain both causes and solutions to poverty.