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How Nonprofits Make Sense of Corporate Volunteering

12/01/2022

Corporate volunteering is an increasingly common type of nonprofit-business collaboration and can take various forms. While the benefits of corporate volunteering for the business partner are well studied, the benefits for the nonprofit partner are less evident and often questioned. Drawing on interviews with staff in nonprofit organizations and building on the concepts of sensemaking and cognitive frames, Hanna Schneider and Michaela Neumayr investigate why nonprofits engage in and how they make sense of corporate volunteering collaborations.

They reveal that decisions about corporate volunteering collaborations usually go beyond the resources acquired through corporate volunteering itself. Identifying three different corporate volunteering frames, they show how these frames leads to different types of partnerships. Depending on the frame used, different perceptions of the distribution of power between the nonprofit and the business partner exist, addressing the crucial role of how nonprofit organizations position themselves in such partnerships.

Full article: How Nonprofits Make Sense of Corporate Volunteering: Explaining Different Forms of Nonprofit-Business Collaboration

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