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Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are established not with the aim of making profits but rather to provide social values by implementing different projects and activities. Transmitting complete information about these projects to society is a key element of transparency, as they operate within an atmosphere of public trust. Although there is a large body of literature on transparency in NGOs from a global perspective, very little research has been conducted on transparency within the area of projects and activities. This study takes a deeper look at this line and contributes to the literature on transparency in NGOs by proposing an index to measure the information transparency of the projects implemented by these organizations. The index captures three dimensions of the information about the projects (technical, financial, and scope) and makes it possible to: analyze the level of transparency of the portfolio of projects, detect the specific aspects that could be improved in each organization, and carry out comparisons among organizations.

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The notion of accountability in nonprofits suggests that these organisations should disclose financial and non-financial practices following a holistic model. In practice, the interest of both managers and researchers has focused primarily on donors and financial disclosures, for funding and methodological reasons respectively. From the perspective of impact investment, all of them, government, beneficiaries, private donors, managers and volunteers are expected to make their decisions based on non-financial information as investors expecting social returns. However, to what extent does project information that demonstrates that the non-profit organisation has achieved its social mission actually matter? The main objective of this paper is to analyse whether the donations received by non-governmental organisations NGOs are related to the information disclosed on the projects undertaken. We perform our analysis separately for individual, private and public donors. Our results show that public donors are more interested in financial disclosures, private donors find information about outcomes and impacts to be most useful and individual donors do not tend to use non-financial information when it comes to making decisions about whether to donate or not.

Since nonprofits use third-party funds for their activities, they are often perceived as resource managers or spending units, instead of being considered as social wealth generating entities. The aim of this study is to help to overcome this myopic perception by showing how the invisible wealth generated by these organizations can be made visible. We use the SROI methodology to do so, by identifying stakeholders, outcomes (tangible, intangible) and social impacts in a drug addiction treatment centre. The results show that social impact in monetary terms exceeds that of the inputs used, confirming the idea that addiction-based nonprofits are social wealth generating units. The conclusion drawn is that social impact measurement should be widely used as a management tool and a mechanism for reinforcing the social image of nonprofits.