Does Use of Emotion Increase Donations and Volunteers for Nonprofits?

Nonprofits offer services to disadvantaged populations, mobilize collective action, and advocate for civil rights. Conducting this work requires significant resources, raising the question: how do nonprofits succeed in increasing donations and volunteers amid widespread competition for these resources? Much research treats nonprofits as cold, rational entities, focusing on overhead, the "price" of donations, and efficiency in programming. We argue that nonprofits attract donors and volunteers by connecting to their emotions. We use newly available administrative IRS 990 e-filer data to analyze 90,000 nonprofit missions from 2012 to 2016. Computational text analysis measures the positive or negative affect of each nonprofit's mission statement. We then link the positive and negative sentiment expressed by nonprofits to their donations and volunteers. We differentiate between the institutional fields of nonprofits-for example, arts, education, social welfare-distinguishing nonprofits focused on social bonding from those focused on social problems. We find that expressed positive emotion is often associated with higher donations and volunteers, especially in bonding fields. But for some types of nonprofits, combining positive sentiment with negative sentiment in a mission statement is most effective in producing volunteers. Auxiliary analyses using experimental and longitudinal designs provide converging evidence that emotional language enhances charitable behavior. Understanding the role of emotion can help nonprofit organizations attract and engage volunteers and donors.

Revisiting Declines in Social Capital: Evidence from a New Measure.

In the late twentieth century, researchers began calling attention to declining social capital in America and the potential consequences of this trend for a healthy society. While researchers empirically assessed the decline in social capital from the mid-1900s onward, this line of research diminished when the major source of data, the General Social Survey, stopped fielding critical questions in 2004. We do not know, therefore, whether social capital, especially associational social capital, has declined, stabilized, or even increased in a twentyfirst century America. In this paper, we develop a new measure of associational social capital using a confirmatory factor analysis of six indicators from the Civic Engagement Supplement to the Current Population Survey for 2008-2011 and 2013. Our findings support previous research suggesting that associational social capital does not seem to be declining over time. However, we do find evidence of a nonlinear decrease in associating during the Great Recession years. Across the entire time period, though, membership in groups has not declined and there has been little practical change in the amount of time that individuals spend with neighbors. Our analysis of the variance of social capital also shows no general change in the national dispersion of social capital from 2008 to 2013. The paper advances the measurement of social capital and updates our understanding of its possible decline.

Do National Service Programs Improve Subjective Well-Being in Communities?

Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs. Although limited in size, these persistent effects are robust to multiple threats to inference and provide important new evidence on how national service improves communities in the United States.