Nonprofits and Advocacy

Seasoned practitioners deep in the trenches of nonprofit advocacy will enjoy pausing to reflect on various insights offered by this collection of scholarly studies. The book can prompt questions about ways to cross-fertilize approaches and spark innovative ideas for advancing nonprofits’ missions for the communities they serve.

The subtitle says it all—the policy issue is how the nonprofit community can advocate successfully for adequate social services when government seems determined to withdraw from the social sector. The volume collects analyses from the leading scholars in the field and gives us hope that more focused and intelligent advocacy can restore social welfare to the public agenda.

This edited volume provides a most welcome collection of excellent empirical chapters on key aspects of nonprofit advocacy on national and subnational levels. The variety of methods employed (content analysis of historical documents, case studies, interviews, surveys) and topics examined offer particularly rich portraits of this complex but critical domain.

Nonprofits and Advocacy comes just in time. It is a very important volume for various reasons. Firstly, it goes far beyond the so-called business talk of current nonprofit research. Focusing on advocacy as a genuine and distinctive feature of nonprofit activity, the volume expands our knowledge of the impact of nonprofit activity distinctively. Secondly, advocacy and lobbying, genuine segments of the life of NPOs, that are carrying prime importance for the further advancement of civil society, are finally back on the nonprofit research agenda. Furthermore, the contributions in the volume draw on the results of empirical research in this particular field of study, which – with a few exceptions - has been neglected by the NPO-research community for quite a while. And, the volume, for a very first time, sheds light on the distinctiveness and complexity of the various venues of how nonprofits engage in advocacy on behalf of their clients, their members and first of all on behalf of the wellbeing of the community at large. This, in particular, makes the volume a "must have" for everybody who is either working in the nonprofit field or is an aficionado of nonprofit activity.

This volume provides important data and expertly identifies gaps in our understanding. It is an important and well-crafted book that deserves a wide readership.