University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is a public research university and major center for academic research. Home to more than 51,000 students and 3,000 teaching faculty, UT Austin is one of the top 20 public universities, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Dr. Pamela Paxton, professor of sociology and public affairs at UT Austin, received a 2017 National Service and Civic Engagement Research grant to study nonprofits, civic infrastructure, and health and wellbeing. Using IRS data on 1.6 million nonprofit tax forms between 2010 and 2016, the project is creating a database of thousands of measures of nonprofit finances, expenditures, mission, capacity, and leadership. Then, through aggregation and text-analytics techniques, the project will create county- and city-level measures of civic infrastructure such as volunteerism, nonprofit capacity, and area mission focus based on features of the nonprofits in the community.
The project will explore such questions as:
- How can we better measure and assess the civic infrastructure provided by nonprofit organizations?
- Do large nonprofits or nonprofits that use more volunteers produce greater benefits to the communities they serve?
- Do nonprofits that stress the positive in their mission statements attract more donors and volunteers?
Results show that positive emotion expressed by a nonprofit is often associated with higher donations and volunteers, especially if the work of the nonprofit relates to social bonding. For some types of nonprofits, combining positive emotion with negative emotion is most effective in producing volunteers. The team also showed that volunteers, organizational field, and self-identification of religiosity are all associated with nonprofit levels of donations. Further, the team provided new estimates of religion in the nonprofit sector, showing that organizations with a religious identity are about 15 percent of all nonprofits and that there are approximately 500,000 religious and religiously-identified organizations in the U.S.
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