Date Thesis Awarded
4-2011
Access Type
Honors Thesis -- Access Restricted On-Campus Only
Degree Name
Bachelors of Arts (BA)
Department
Economics
Advisor
Robert B. Archibald
Committee Members
Monica D. Griffin
Melissa McInerney
Abstract
Today, 89% of American households contribute to charities with 8,941 nonprofit organizations in Virginia alone. With the nonprofit sector continuing to grow, funders seek was to identify the best nonprofit. Overhead ratio, the fraction of total expenditures spent on non-programmatic costs, is a common measure of success because of the abundance of financial data and commonality between organizations. Many nonprofit supporters claim that overhead ratio as a metric is inherently flawed largely because investment in infrastructure is necessary for success. I examined the success of nonprofit organizations throughout Virginia and North Caroline and contrast that with their overhead ratio and related financial metrics. I evaluated the relationship between overhead ratio and more holistic measures of success to help guide future evaluations of nonprofit organizations, finding positive, diminishing returns to administrative investment.
Recommended Citation
Tiver, Samanthe E., "A Closer Look at Nonprofit Evaluation" (2011). Undergraduate Honors Theses. William & Mary. Paper 349.
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/honorstheses/349
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Comments
Thesis is part of Honors ETD pilot project, 2008-2013. Migrated from Dspace in 2016.