This publication is the result of the collaboration with Research Fellow Eline Crins. At the time, she was Head of Programs at Kansfonds, and she joined our team with great energy and a wealth of ideas on how research can meaningfully contribute to improving the philanthropy sector.
One of the projects we worked on focused on a persistent challenge in our field:
👉 how to use data already collected by philanthropic organizations for academic research, so that insights can be shared beyond individual organizations—and to help address the broader issue of limited data availability for testing key ideas empirically.
This work has been published in the Journal of Philanthropy (open access).
Key points from the article:
- Philanthropic funders are increasingly adopting unrestricted or flexible grantmaking.
- While this type of funding aims to strengthen nonprofit capacities, we still know relatively little about how to measure these capacities rigorously.
- Our study shows how an existing longitudinal, practice-based survey can be used to measure nonprofit capacities in line with academic theory. These insights provide tools for both practitioners and researchers to advance empirical work on nonprofit capacity building.
- Importantly, our findings also tentatively suggest that unrestricted funding is particularly valuable for smaller, capacity-constrained organizations (as always—more research is needed 😊).
👉 Read the open access article here
This Research Fellow position would not have been possible without the generous—and unrestricted—support of the Postcode Loterij and Kansfonds. A special thanks to Kansfonds, and especially Henriette Hulsebosch.