Kim, Macindoe & Faulk: Who Funds Nonprofit Advocacy?
The nonprofit sector plays a vital democratic role via public policy engagement through advocacy, including lobbying. This study investigates the relationships between revenue sources and different forms of nonprofit engagement in public policy. Resource dependence theory suggests that nonprofit efforts to shape their environments through advocacy will be facilitated or constrained by organizations’ interactions with various funding sources. We find that issue advocacy and lobbying indeed are associated with various funding sources in different ways. Managerial capacity, including legal knowledge regarding advocacy, is also significantly associated with both advocacy and lobbying. Importantly, we find that the relationships between revenue sources and advocacy vary across subsectors and that government funding specifically is only associated with advocacy by human service nonprofits. Finally, we examine the association between different funding sources and a set of specific public engagement activities that generally fall under advocacy and lobbying definitions. Our findings demonstrate important nuances beyond the catch-all operationalizations of advocacy/lobbying and highlight the importance of interactions between nonprofits’ external sources of funding and their specific policy engagement activities.
Lloyd Mayer