Center for Social Innovation

You may welcome the efficiency that market forces increasingly bring to the nonprofit sector. Or you may fear that growing commercialization threatens the sector’s integrity. Either way, you’re probably wrong. Amid impassioned debate over the implications of nonprofits’ commercial turn, a fresh look at the data shows that perhaps there actually isn’t one. The evidence “is kind of like a Rorschach blot—you can see in it what you want, but there’s no clear trend,” says Curtis Child, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Indiana University. “Nonprofits just aren’t, as a whole, becoming more commercialized.”

Child returned to the same data others cite when they make the case that nonprofits are relying more and more heavily on earned income over donations or grants. One incriminating indicator, “unrelated business income,” is the money a museum makes from selling Empire State Building snow globes (which presumably don’t bring fine art to the people) but not from reprints of Vincent van Gogh paintings ... Read more