Reputation Management for Nonprofit Organizations

• Applicant: Jurgen Willems, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313624637

This project focuses on reputation of nonprofit organizations, and on how it influences the intentions of stakeholders to support these nonprofit organizations. The project is built on the literature of nonprofit effectiveness and performance measurement, and the research steps proposed are aimed to further develop managerial knowledge on how nonprofit organizations can manage their reputation to increase stakeholder support. The main goal of this project is to investigate how perceptions and reputations on non-profit organizations are shaped (1) over time (2) through social interactions (3) with and among various groups of stakeholders.Three earlier pilot studies have been conducted. These studies were based on online surveys where the perceived effectiveness of an organization is analyzed among internal and external stakeholders. In these studies multi-level regression and structural equation modeling was applied to explain perceived non-profit effectiveness through group cohesion, trust and satisfaction among stakeholders regarding the communication of the organization. The preliminary findings and methodological learning points of these studies have been used to develop the concrete and more detailed research agenda of this project.In this research project a mixed method approach will be taken. This allows for the parallel development of both theoretical insights and the robust empirical verification of these insights. Three main research paths will be taken. First, a series of subsequent experiments will be conducted. In these experiments the focus will be on the longitudinal nature of reputation building and on the cumulative effect on stakeholder supporting behavior of different signals about a nonprofit organization. The second research path will focus on qualitative data collection among nonprofit practitioners. This qualitative and exploratory inquiry has the concrete aim to get a more in-depth insight in how the processes of reputation building work. Furthermore, it supports a more elaborated theory development on the broad set of potential antecedents of reputation building for nonprofit stakeholder support. Third, a quantitative survey analysis will be done in which different insights from both the experiments and the qualitative exploration can be verified in combination with each other. As such, this third path compensates for the hypothetical nature of the experiments and it can add insights with respect to the generalizability of the findings from the qualitative study. The steps proposed in this research proposal will lead to dissemination of the results in academic journals and on scientific conferences. This will lead in the first place to valuable input to increase the quality of the project in itself, but in particular this dissemination is focused on delivering a robust and valuable contribution in the domain of nonprofit effectiveness management.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants