Understanding Nonprofit Work A Communication Perspective

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the application and utility of a communication approach across several key issues for nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector.  Communication is central to nonprofit organizations and the activities of the nonprofit sector. Fundraising and donor relations, client relationships and service delivery, volunteer management and board governance, collaboration and cross-sector partnerships—all involve dynamic processes of human interaction. For this reason, communication scholars have developed a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research on the nonprofit. Yet despite the importance of communication to the nonprofit sector and the research done in this field, to date there is no central textbook that brings together this growing corpus of information in communication. This absence is notable because the study of the nonprofit sector within the field of communication and across universities more generally has grown considerably over the last decade; most major communication studies programs in the US regularly offer upper-level undergraduate and/or graduate courses on communication and non-profits.

MATTHEW A. KOSCHMANN is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on organizational communication and collaboration, especially in the civil society sector. His work has been published in numerous scholarly outlets such as Management Communication Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Social Science, and the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction; plus, his research has been funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation. Professor Koschmann teaches classes on organizational communication, leadership communication, group interaction, persuasion, conversation, and research methods. He is also a Fulbright scholar and worked as a visiting research professor at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

MATTHEW L. SANDERS is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Utah State University. His research focuses on communication and nonprofit organizations. He also writes about communication and teaching. His research has been published in scholarly outlets such as Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Management Communication Quarterly, The Review of Communication, Organization, and The Review of Communication. He is also the author of Becoming a Learner: Realizing the Opportunity of Education, and Studying Communication: An Invitation to Purposeful Learning. Professor Sanders teaches classes on organizational communication, nonprofits and social change, leadership, interpersonal communication, qualitative research methods, and communication pedagogy. In 2018 he received the Distinguished Teaching Award from the Western States Communication Association.

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

Preface

1 Developing a Communication Perspective of the Nonprofit
Matthew A. Koschmann and Matthew L. Sanders

2 Communicative L-M-G (Leadership, Management, and Governance)
Matthew A. Koschmann

3 The Marketization of Nonprofit Work
Matthew L. Sanders

4 Collaborcation
Matthew A. Koschmann

5 Meaningful Nonprofit Work
Matthew L. Sanders

6 International Nonprofit Work
Matthew A. Koschmann

Conclusion: Understanding What it Means to be Nonprofit
Matthew A. Koschmann and Matthew L. Sanders

Index