Quantitative research for nonprofit management

Although the literature on organizational management has burgeoned recently, it has focused primarily on for‐profit organizations. Moreover, widely published management prescriptions are often faddish in nature. It is risky for nonprofit managers to uncritically adopt these prescriptions. Not only may they be inappropriate for the Nonprofit setting, they may also be based on inadequate research. The nonprofit sector needs to develop its own research agenda and distribute usable findings to nonprofit managers. This process is in its infancy. While research on the nonprofit sector has been vigorous over the last few decades, most of it has focused on philanthropy or the delineation of the sector's dimensions. It is vitally important that management practices in the Nonprofit sector be based on sound, useful research. Given the nature of social science research, much of this will be quantitative research. In this article, I lay out some basic parameters of quantitative research and discuss its relevance to and utility for nonprofit management.