Dr. Casey Fleming has a forthcoming article in “Human Service Organizations: Management, Leadership, & Governance” that examines the capacity of nonprofit sector elites, such as leadership coalitions and other nonprofit infrastructure organizations, to use strategic messaging to influence donor intentions and decisions to support human service nonprofits engaging in varying mixes of direct service and policy advocacy activities.
A couple of key punchlines from this experimental study are (1) that strategic messaging emphasizing the importance of root causes of societal issues and missions of social change can increase donations to particular nonprofits engaging in policy advocacy work; and (2) that strategic messaging focused on calls for direct service activities fail to influence donor intentions.
