Conceptualizing and Measuring the Promotion of Nonprofit Organizations’ Evidence Use by U.S. Social Service Funding Programs

Abstract

Previous research on U.S. federal promotion of evidence-based programming has focused on evidence-based program registries and concludes their usefulness is undermined by prioritizing internal validity over external validity. This research explores how federal funding programs are actually promoting funded nonprofit organizations’ evidence use instead of what we might infer from registries alone. An inductively developed conceptual framework is applied to describe all 53 fiscal year (FY) 2019 social service funding programs that include nonprofit organizations among the eligible applicants, finding they promote multiple types of evidence use, with generally low coerciveness, and with applicants frequently co-determining what counts as evidence. These findings point to promotion of evidence use that balances evidence-driven prescriptiveness and enabling nonprofits’ innovation.

الاستراتیجیات الترویجیة للطروحات العامة فی الأسواق المالیة المصریة بین الممارسات ومحددات النجاح

“…-3 - (Horne et al, 2021;Soares and Sousa, 2021;Ressler et al, 2021) (Mangold and Faulds, 2009;Cho and Ha, 2011;Yousaf, 2016;Kumar and Patra, 2017;Lim and Guzmán, 2022)…”

Editor’s Introduction: Highlighting Strategies of the Nonprofit Sector

“…Yet, the authors conclude that movement toward a hybrid communication strategy that includes both social media and nonsocial media outlets is crucial for organizational sustainability, particularly for those nonprofits targeting different age groups, as the use of social media platforms for marketoriented activities allows nonprofits to attract and maintain donors and generate more earned income while also expanding their social impact. Horne et al (2021) examine U.S. social service funding programs for which nonprofit organizations are eligible recipients to determine the extent to which such programs promote the use of evidence by nonprofits to improve their youth development programming in terms of needs assessment, program design, program implementation, program evaluation, and knowledge dissemination. By recognizing the competing goals that federal funding agencies face of promoting the use of evidence to accomplish more effective and efficient programming and fostering innovation and community-specific adaptation in service provision, the authors find that federal funding of nonprofit social services appears to be rather successfully balancing these important goals through the promotion of broad types of evidence use, low levels of coerced use of evidence, and encouraging the prescriptive use of evidence for program design while also fostering innovation.…”