Abstract

A nonprofit organization has multiple stakeholders, such as clients, employees, funders, licensing and accrediting bodies, and boards of directors. These stakeholders may have different criteria in evaluating the organization's effectiveness. Because of the lack of a market oriented bottom-line profit or loss criteria, leaders and researchers struggle with the concretization of the concept of nonprofit organization effectiveness. The principal aim of this research is to conceptually replicate part of a 1997 study using the latest theoretical approach to the analysis of nonprofit organization effectiveness, the social construction approach. Using sampling procedures and statistical data-analytic techniques, this research investigates the differences among stakeholders in their effectiveness judgments of nonprofit organizations. Survey responses from 174 stakeholders (49 board members, 55 employees, 36 funders and 34 beneficiaries) of 55 Montreal nonprofit organizations were analyzed. Consequences and implications for nonprofit organization managers were drawn from the analysis.