Research Resources
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A new study finds that nonprofits are not becoming more commercialized.
Disseminating insights and know-how across any organization is critical to improving performance, but nonprofits struggle to implement organizational learning and make it a priority. A recent study found three common barriers to knowledge sharing across nonprofits and their networks, as well as ways and means to overcome them.
Executives from 10 major corporations gathered in New York City to discuss the innovative ways that they are putting societal issues at the core of their companies’ strategy and operations.
GlobalGiving’s storytelling project turns anecdotes into useful data.
As Japan shifts from disaster relief to rebuilding, GSB alumni see opportunities for change and renewal.
Bruce McNamer, MBA '96, examines how a nonprofit's work in Mozambique and in other developing countries is showing businesses how to break the cycle of poverty.
His career has taken Jonathan Reckford, MBA '89, from corporate leadership to his current post as chief executive officer with global nonprofit Habitat for Humanity. His success, he says, comes from following his faith and his heart.
Invited at Stanford by a group of pro-social scientists from top universities, some 60 U.S. business and nonprofit leaders examined simple, practical, and cost-effective solutions for encouraging donations, volunteerism, social activism, and other responsible, caring, and pro-social behaviors.
Researchers find a stronger tie between money and happiness for people paid by the hour than by salary, because hourly workers are more regularly reminded of the value of their time, according to work co-authored by business school Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer.
Two alumnae develop a warmer community center for strays, pets and their owners at Humane Society Silicon Valley.
Under the EPA’s Audit Policy, violators who voluntarily report themselves can get certain penalties reduced or waived if they commit to ongoing self-regulation…. But is that promise any more than window dressing?
One Acre Fund feeds the world’s poor by helping them feed themselves.
Engineers Without Borders’ new website, Admitting Failure, gives new life to “good failures.” It aims to help organizations learn from others’ mistakes.
Why local ownership and commitment are the exception and not the norm in most development efforts—and what development professionals can do about this problem.
Integrated reporting—the combination of a company’s financial and non-financial performance in one document—is a crucial step to creating a more sustainable society. It is being practiced around the globe by companies as varied as Philips, Novo Nordisk, PepsiCo, and Southwest Airlines.
The recession should be spurring nonprofits, giving organizations and individual givers to regroup and find innovative ways to address urgent social and global needs that only are getting worse because of the growing economic crisis. Foundations are creatively adjusting to the current economic crisis.
The giving sector, especially in the face of the continuing economic crisis, needs to retool its model for charitable giving and fundraising. Nonprofits, for example, should start looking at building social media into their overall fundraising and communication strategies. Often reluctant to move beyond traditional strategies, whether or not those actually produce positive results, nonprofits should look at social-media tools that are changing the way people communicate, connect and spur one another to action.
Unionizing charter-school teachers brings to light the ever-present income inequity that takes place within the nonprofit sector. The Nonprofiteer firmly believes that charter schools–like other nonprofits–are the most fertile territory for union organizing, and she’s not surprised to see that organizing professionals have figured that fact out as well. Combine the relative immobility of most nonprofits–the Art Institute of Chicago won’t pick up stakes and move to Singapore–with their routine underpayment and general exploitation of their employees, and it shouldn’t be a surprise when the union comes to call.
An interview with Gavin Glabaugh, long-time IT guru at the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation, gives incite on where nonprofits have been and where we’re going in terms of using technology.
Foundations can do much more to address the economic crisis and the human toll it is taking. Instead of hoarding their assets so they can perpetuate their wealth and their power, foundation boards should be voting to pay out more in assets and better fulfilling their governance role by taking a more active role as shareholders. Foundations should be putting all their assets, including those they pay out and those they invest in the capital markets, to more productive use to address the critical and escalating social and global problems we face.
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Despite falling to number 49 on the list of countries ranked by life expectancy, the United States still spends roughly twice as much on health care per capita as other top-ranked nations. In this panel discussion, Dr. David Shern and Father Larry Snyder discuss the role of the voluntary sector in this period of necessary reform, and what their organizations specifically are doing to improve the quality of American lives.
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Connecting good, effective nonprofits and other organizations that get the job done is the mission of Craigconnects, the latest enterprise of Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. In this audio interview with host Ashkon Jafari, Newmark discusses the organization's philosophy, primary activities, and future plans.
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Inequalities between socially marginalized and non-marginalized groups have led to poorer school and health outcomes for African Americans, Latino Americans, and other non-Asian ethnic minorities. Although many structural factors contribute to these inequalities, this study examines one psychological factor: concern about social belonging — a sense of having positive relationships with others.
The investigation into what messaging motivates people to vote and the effectiveness of facilitating a voting plan during a presidential election.
Most observers agree that human consumption is on a crash course with the environment. Although recycling programs have been implemented in many cities around the world, people often do not participate as often as they could. This research examines the effectiveness of messages that highlight the negative consequences of not recycling (loss frames) versus those that emphasize the positive consequences of recycling (gain frames) in influencing people's behavior.
Identifying effective obesity treatment is both a clinical challenge and a public health priority. Can monetary incentives stimulate weight loss? Leslie John presents a study that examines different economic incentives for weight loss during a 16 week intervention.
Nonprofits in the U.S. generate $1.1 trillion every year, which is more than the entire economies of Saudi Arabia and Sweden combined. "Know Your Sector", a video created by alum Ben Klasky (MBA '98), is intended as a resource for nonprofit employees, volunteers, and donors to better know the impact of their sector.
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How can nonprofit and crowdsourcing experts collaborate to make media more accessible? In this audio interview, Sheela Sethuraman talks to Dean Jansen, co-Founder of Universal Subtitles, a volunteer platform for doing collaborative subtitling and translation of videos. As the winner of The Tech Awards 2011 Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award, Jansen discussed Universal Subtitles' current challenges and future potential in leveraging internet volunteerism.
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Melissa Bradley, CEO of Tides, explores how partnerships between for-profit and nonprofit organizations--and everything in between--can increase scale and impact. In this audio lecture, recorded at the Stanford Social Innovation Review's 2011 Nonprofit Management Institute, Bradley discusses the current landscape of the social sector, and what scale and impact really mean. She also shares case studies of successful partnerships and the "top ten" lessons we can draw from collaborations.
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Commissioned by KaBOOM! and authored by Katherine Fulton and alumna Heather McLeod Grant of the Monitor Institute, this case study looks at the challenges KaBOOM! faced and lessons the organization learned while pioneering an online strategy to scale its impact. This strategy involves giving away the nonprofit model online for free to empower others to act on KaBoom's behalf.
In 2002, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, dedicated to building a better future for disadvantaged children, hired a director of social investments. The director faces challenges such as how to enable the long-term sustainability of grantees, track financial and programmatic performance of investments, and resolve the tension between social investment and programmatic strategies.
In 1988, Jim Thompson founded Positive Coaching Alliance, a nonprofit focused on helping overcome negative trends in youth involving bad sportsmanship. These cases detail PCA’s efforts to raise awareness of the issues among athletes and the general public with an eye toward changing behavior.
Practitioners and academics at a 2004 Stanford University conference discussed the field of venture philanthropy. The overview includes topics such as capacity building, relationships between grantors and grantees, and performance measurement.
Neighborhood Health Clinic is a nonprofit health center located in an ethnically diverse, underserved, and complicated community. These cases explore the challenges that staff began to face in working together effectively and efficiently, and what course of action the executive team took to address the problems.
The Center for Blended Value is a think tank that promotes the concept of “blended value” investments. The founder wondered how to overcome the challenges associated with encouraging more foundations to adopt a value-mixing strategy of financial asset management.
Innermotion dance company presents performances based on themes related to incest and childhood sexual abuse. This video explores how the founder must reexamine her focus and priorities when faced with the loss of a major grant.
The director of a successful school in Botswana was planning her retirement. How could she institutionalize processes she had personally overseen that had led to the school's excellence?
The Rainforest Action Network works to protect the Earth’s rainforests and support the rights of their inhabitants. In April 2003, a new executive director began a review of the organization’s strategy and mission.
Planned Parenthood is looking for funding to assess the Sand Hill Foundation’s Teen Success Program for replication. Those involved in the program hope to more constructively engage stakeholders in the evaluation process, monitor the program’s impact, and take action on evaluation results.
TransFair USA, the fair trade labeling arm of the Fair Trade Labeling Organization, faced strategic challenges in 2003. The founder needed to convince uninformed mainstream consumers and skeptical large-scale coffee roasters to buy Fair Trade Certified coffee.
Riders for Health is a U.K.-based nonprofit dedicated to the improvement of transportation systems for health workers in Africa. In 2007, after 11 years in existence, the organization was at a critical point and had to decide what strategies were necessary to expand.
The X PRIZE Foundation originated as prize competitions for significant development in the exploration of outer space. Several problems faced the organization as it began to focus on fields outside of space, including whether prize competitions could work in areas such as poverty.
In 2006, AARP was one of the largest, most well-known nonprofits in the United States. However, the organization faced numerous public relations and strategic challenges.
The Rural Development Institute was established in the 1970s to alleviate poverty by securing land rights for the world’s rural poor. The organization was considering whether to enter India to work for land reform.
In 2000, the Rural Development Institute entered India. The organization had to modify its model to address the unique aspects of the situation in that country.
“Ask and you shall receive” is the moral of this research. A series of studies reveals that people tend to grossly underestimate how likely others are to agree to requests for assistance. In a variety of different studies the results were generally the same. When the participants asked for help in a straight-forward manner they generally got the help they needed whether it was for directions, money or time.
The researchers examine the relationship between income inequality and corporate demography in regional labor markets, and demonstrate how the number and diversity of employers affects wage dispersion.
This article examines how interorganizational competition and social movement industry concentration affect the level of tactical and goal specialization of protest organizations associated with the peace, women's, and environmental movements.
Most major symphony orchestras in the United States regularly spend more money than they take in, and some dip so far into endowments that they risk their long-term survival, according to a new report commissioned by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Asking would-be donors for their time, not their money, is a better way for charities to increase donations, says professor Jennifer Aaker. Asking donors first to volunteer their time can positively shift their willingness to give both time and money.
This course surveys strategic, governance, and management issues facing a wide range of nonprofit organizations in an era of venture philanthropy and social entrepreneurship. It introduces students to core managerial issues in the nonprofit sector, such as development/fundraising, investment management, performance management and nonprofit finance.
Jessica Flannery created Kiva to connect lenders to small entrepreneurs without access to financial resources. Her goal? To alleviate poverty.
Jake Harriman starts seed projects in extremely stressed areas of the world. He works to help people lift themselves out of poverty in five years.
Daniel Grossman's Wild Planet creates toys that parents love as much as kids. His aim is to inspire learning and inventiveness.
Bruce McNamer empowers entrepreneurs in rural areas around the world to become self-sufficient. He finds helping people to help themselves a noble calling.
The investigation into what messaging motivates people to vote and the effectiveness of facilitating a voting plan during a presidential election.
Most observers agree that human consumption is on a crash course with the environment. Although recycling programs have been implemented in many cities around the world, people often do not participate as often as they could. This research examines the effectiveness of messages that highlight the negative consequences of not recycling (loss frames) versus those that emphasize the positive consequences of recycling (gain frames) in influencing people's behavior.
Identifying effective obesity treatment is both a clinical challenge and a public health priority. Can monetary incentives stimulate weight loss? Leslie John presents a study that examines different economic incentives for weight loss during a 16 week intervention.
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Stanford GSB researchers find that how people respond to mistakes can be a "clue to who they are.”