Understanding Nonprofit Work : A Communication Perspective

The purpose of this book is to demonstrate the application and utility of a communication approach across several key issues for nonprofit organizations and the nonprofit sector. Communication is central to nonprofit organizations and the activities of the nonprofit sector. Fundraising and donor relations, client relationships and service delivery, volunteer management and board governance, collaboration and cross-sector partnerships--all involve dynamic processes of human interaction. For this reason, communication scholars have developed a considerable amount of theoretical and empirical research on the nonprofit. Yet despite the importance of communication to the nonprofit sector and the research done in this field, to date there is no central textbook that brings together this growing corpus of information in communication. This absence is notable because the study of the nonprofit sector within the field of communication and across universities more generally has grown considerably over the last decade; most major communication studies programs in the US regularly offer upper-level undergraduate and/or graduate courses on communication and non-profits.