America's nonprofit organizations are widely involved
in efforts to influence the public policies
affecting them and those they serve but are constrained by
tight budgets, limited staff time and
confusing legal restrictions, according to a new survey by
the Johns
Hopkins University Nonprofit Listening Post
Project.
Seventy-three percent of responding nonprofit
organizations said they had engaged in some
type of advocacy or lobbying in the year prior to the
survey, with three out of five of those
organizations engaging in public policy efforts at least
once a month. The researchers found, however,
that the depth of organizational involvement is often
limited to the executive director and rarely
engages the general public or even the organization's
clients or patrons.
A major reason for this lack of depth appears to be
the limited resources nonprofits have
available to support advocacy activities. Fewer than 15
percent of organizations that engaged in any
lobbying or advocacy reported devoting as much as 2 percent
of their overall budget to this function.
Lack of time and resources was the principal reason cited
by those that reported no advocacy or
lobbying activity.
"Our nation's nonprofit organizations are widely
expected to play a key role in helping to
promote democracy and civic action, and our survey results
indicate that they are making strenuous
efforts to fulfill this expectation," said Lester M.
Salamon, study author and director of the
Center for Civil Society Studies at the Johns Hopkins
Institute for Policy Studies.
"However, financial and
other constraints are limiting their ability to do so."
Larry Ottinger of the Center for Lobbying in the
Public Interest, which partnered with Johns
Hopkins on this survey, said, "Nonprofit advocacy is a
critical strategy for solving our society's most
challenging problems. This important survey should serve as
a clarion call to the nonprofit and
philanthropy sector to boost the resources and training
devoted to this crucial function."
Additional findings from the survey include:
♦ Large organizations and those involved in family,
children and elderly services are most
extensively engaged in policy advocacy. Arts organizations
are least involved.
♦ About half of all responding organizations
reported undertaking relatively limited forms of
advocacy or lobbying, such as signing correspondence to a
public official, responding to requests for
information on policy issues or distributing materials on
policy matters. When it came to more involved
forms of participation, such as testifying at hearings or
organizing a public event, the proportion
reporting any involvement fell to about a third.
♦ State and local governments, not the federal
government, are the principal focus of advocacy
activity for most (two out of three) organizations.
♦ Receipt of public funding seems to encourage
advocacy, but reliance on private philanthropy is
negatively related to advocacy.
♦ Only a quarter of the organizations reporting no
involvement in lobbying or advocacy cited
worries about existing laws as a reason. Among those that
refrained from lobbying but not advocacy,
however, nearly half cited worries about violating laws as
a reason. This indicates a continued
constraining influence of existing laws limiting nonprofit
involvement in lobbying (expressing a position
on a specific piece of legislation to a legislative
official) as opposed to advocacy (conveying a policy
concern or policy-relevant information without expressing a
position on a particular piece of
legislation).
♦ Associations and coalitions play a considerable
role in nonprofit lobbying and advocacy, both as a
substitute for the involvement of some organizations and as
a spur to involvement by others. Nearly
90 percent of respondents reported belonging to at least
one coalition or intermediary organization,
and most of these had some involvement in advocacy or
lobbying.
♦ The vast majority (90 percent) of surveyed
organizations agreed that "nonprofits have a duty
to advocate for policies important to their missions," and
a comparable proportion agreed that
organizations like their own should be "more active and
involved."
♦ Reflecting the survey responses, the report
suggests a number of steps that could help
charities carry out what it describes as a critical
democratic responsibility. Among these are
increasing the resources available to field-specific
intermediary organizations for policy advocacy
work, expanding foundation support for nonprofit policy
advocacy, encouraging greater board
involvement in nonprofit advocacy and providing more
training and other assistance to encourage
advocacy activity by small and mid-sized organizations.
The full text of the report "Nonprofit America: A
Force for Democracy?" is available online at:
www.jhu.edu/listeningpost/news.
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