NNSI Editorial Team

The Impact of Interorganizational Network Evolution on Outcomes for Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs): A Summary of Current Research

View the Resource By Michelle Shumate, Andrew Pilny, Katherine R. Cooper, Yannick Atouba Around the world, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots movements, governments, cooperatives, and universities are discovering that the fight against issues such as poverty, hunger, disease, pandemics, disasters, and environmental degradation requires new forms of organizing, self-organizing networks (Contractor, 1994; Fukuyama, 1999). The networked form of governance represents an empowerment approach to issues of poverty and development (Melkote, 2002),

Collective Impact: What Is It, and Why Is It of Interest to NNSI Researchers?

By Katherine R. Cooper Here at NNSI, we hear a lot about collective impact. What is it? What role should nonprofits play in collective impact? Our researchers have been interested in this phenomenon for some time; this week, we provide an overview of what we know about collective impact – and our efforts to explore collective impact from a research standpoint. What Is Collective Impact? The concept of collective impact

NNSI Research Report: Nonprofit Business Relationships

By Michelle Shumate As nonprofits consider partnering with businesses in a variety of ways, including sponsorships, cause-marketing, or more integrative arrangements, two important questions emerge. First, which businesses should they partner with? Second, how many business partnerships do most nonprofits maintain and talk about? In other words, how many is too many? Shumate, Hsieh and O’Connor examine these questions in their 2016 study of 122 of the largest, most recognizable U.S.

The Symbiotic Sustainability Model: Conceptualizing NGO–Corporate Alliance Communication

View the Resource By Michelle Shumate, Amy O’Connor We introduce the Symbiotic Sustainability Model (SSM) as a macrolevel explanation of nongovernmental organization (NGO)-corporate alliances. The SSM presents NGO-corporate alliances as distinct interorganizational communication relationships, symbolized to stakeholders to influence the mobilization of capital. We contend that alliance partners communicatively co-construct the alliance with stakeholders in order to mobilize economic, social, cultural, and political capital. By focusing on the communication of

Corporate Reporting of Cross-Sector Alliances: The Portfolio of NGO Partners Communicated on Corporate Websites

View the Resource By Michelle Shumate, Amy O’Connor Nongovernmental organization (NGO)–corporate alliances are a strategic type of institutional positioning communication. From a sample of 155 US Fortune 500 corporations and 695 NGOs drawn from corporations’ websites, this research examines: (a) the number of NGOs with which corporations communicate alliances; (b) the patterns of communicated alliances that exist between corporations in economic industries and NGOs in social issue industries; and (c)

Connective Collective Action Online: An Examination of the Hyperlink Network Structure of an NGO Issue Network

View the Resource By Michelle Shumate, Justin Lipp Nonprofit, nongovernmental organization (NGO) hyperlink networks are connective public goods, or sets of interorganizational links that enable members and nonmembers to reach like-minded organizations in order to enhance the visibility of the network’s goals. We extend collective action theory to account for both the level and structural signatures of contributions that generalist and specialist organizations make to these connective public goods. This