Organizational or Social Benefits? The Progressiveness of Policy Advocacy in Nonprofit Human Service Organizations

Abstract

Policy advocacy is an integral part of nonprofit work. This paper explores the influencing factors that affect nonprofit human service organizations’ participation in progressive advocacy that addresses broader social inequities rather than self-interested advocacy that focuses on organizational benefits. It considers the development of advocacy goals as a critical strategy-making process in human service organizations, shaped by environmental and organizational contexts. Using survey data from 122 human service nonprofits in Maryland, this study finds that interorganizational competition, collaborations on efforts other than advocacy, and organizational formalization help explain variation in the progressiveness of nonprofit advocacy activities.

Keywords:

• policy advocacy
• progressive advocacy
• self-interested advocacy
• strategic management

Notes

¹ Empirical research on advocacy always suffers from the ambiguous definition of advocacy. The current research distinguishes two types of advocacy in human services, policy advocacy (directed at changing policies or regulations) and case or client advocacy (advocating on behalf of families and individuals) (Mosley, 2013). Policy advocacy further includes the following types of activities (Ezell, 2001; Reid, 1999): (1) lobbying legislative bodies, (2) testifying before legislative committees, (3) meeting with public officials to present problems or propose solutions, (4) writing letters to public officials and asking them to respond, (5) joining government task forces or advisory committees, (6) filing and settling lawsuits, (7) providing legal services or funding for client litigation, (8) using media to disseminate opinions, (9) educating clients about proposed laws and regulations, (10) encouraging clients to become registered voters and vote, (11) putting clients in contact with legislative or elected officials, and (12) helping clients to attend public hearings or meetings. A nonprofit is considered to be involved in policy advocacy when the organization reports its participation in one or more of these activities.

² It should be noted that the breakdown of nonprofit size (small, medium, and large) is relatively arbitrary. Some nonprofit literature uses $5 million budget to distinguish between medium and large organizations (e.g., Ostrower, 2008). This study follows this tradition. The author is grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

³ We used Stata command frm to run the fractional logit model. In addition, Stata commands frm_reset and frm_ggoff were used to conduct the specification tests to ensure that the basic assumptions of fractional regression were met. All three commands were developed by Ramalho (2014).