Nonprofits and Advocacy: Engaging Community and Government in an Era of Retrenchment

2. Nonprofit Advocacy in Seattle and Washington, DC

How do nonprofits advocate? This central research question animates this volume. We adopt an empirical approach to investigating this question, relying here on data gleaned from surveys of nonprofits in King County, Washington (hereafter Seattle), and Washington, DC. We provide details of these surveys in the introduction to this volume; they were designed to illuminate a number of issues in nonprofit advocacy. Our analyses focus on answering the question of which nonprofits advocate. Defining Advocacy We follow the definition of advocacy advanced in the introduction to this volume: “advocacy is the attempt to influence public policy, either directly or indirectly.” In this chapter, we operationalize advocacy as specific responses by organizations to certain survey questions. More specifically, we define a group that engages in advocacy for our analysis below as a group that answered one of five questions on our survey in a specified way. We counted as an advocacy group any nonprofit that identified itself as such in the field question. But we also used measures of reported behavior, in part because of the sensitivities groups display toward identifying themselves as engaged in lobbying or advocacy. Also, we believe survey results are more reliable when they report responses to questions about specific actions. We thus analyze advocacy below in the context of specific responses to questions on our surveys. In other words, when groups tell us that they do something that we consider advocacy, we call it advocacy. We counted as an advocacy group any organization that reported becoming involved in public policy or advocacy, employing a lobbyist, or affiliating with a political action committee or 501(c)(4) that had advocacy as part of its mission. Finally, we counted as an advocacy chapter two Nonprofit Advocacy in Seattle and Washington, DC robert j. pekkanen and steven rathgeb smith 48 The Local and National Dimensions of Nonprofit Advocacy group any organization that reported trying to influence government policy at the local, state, or national level. Using such responses to these questions as our measure of advocacy, we found that 31.9% of Seattle organizations were “advocating organizations” (figs. 2.1 and 2.2). This is comparable to the percentage (27%) found by Child and Grønbjerg (2007) in their study of Indiana nonprofits (266), although far less than that (73%) identified by Salamon and Geller (2008, 1) and lower also than Chaves et al. (2004) found for congregations (over 41%). By implication, Berry and his colleagues find an even higher proportion, 85% if one counts all groups declining to report that they never engage in advocacy (OMB Watch, Tufts University, and Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest, 2002, 17). Differences in the scope of organizations surveyed, survey methods, definition of advocacy, and the geographic region targeted probably account for the divergent results. Only further empirical investigation can be conclusive, but we suspect that what is counted as advocacy and the wording of questions could be enough to create such a wide variation. Figures 2.3 and 2.4 provide an overview of the different types of nonprofit organizations in the DC and Seattle. Figure 2.5 provides information on the budget size of the Seattle organizations in the study. One notable aspect of figure 2.5 is the large number of small nonprofits, mirroring the national composition of the nonprofit sector. Why Do Nonprofits Advocate? One of the most frequently asked questions about nonprofits and advocacy is which nonprofits advocate. This sensible, basic question provides some context for further investigations of advocacy behavior. After all, if only a tiny minority of nonprofits engaged in advocacy, even those with an interest in nonprofits might generally be less interested in the topic, or perhaps scholars would have to reconsider our research methodology to analyze the phenomenon . So a first step is to consider what proportion of nonprofits advocate, which we do below. Our analysis connects this chapter to one of the central themes of the volume, namely, the limitations on advocacy; we see specification of the conditions under which advocacy is (more) likely to occur to be intimately related to the obverse question of which nonprofits are (less) likely to engage in advocacy. And our data are only the latest to show that some nonprofits and not others engage in advocacy. Nonprofit Advocacy in Seattle and Washington, DC 49 Noticing that some but not all nonprofits engage in advocacy naturally leads observers to ask why some nonprofits but...