Nonprofit organizations and social-alliance portfolio size: evidence from website content analysis

Business-Nonprofit Partnership (BNP) has been widely regarded as a vital approach for public value creation and social innovation. At the same time, many studies show a positive association between the size of an organization's portfolio of partners and its overall performance and innovation. Building on these insights, we contribute to the BNP literature by drawing on the relational view to theorize and empirically examine the conditions that underpin the effectiveness of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in establishing collaborative linkages with the private sector (i.e. to determine the size of their portfolio of business partners). Data were compiled from the websites of NPOs (n = 102) that were collaborating with FTSE 100 companies. The results of regression analysis show that the ability of NPOs to deliver economic rent (to business partners) and to establish calculative trust (pre-collaboration trust) is positively associated with their portfolio size. Furthermore, the results indicate that the ability to create social value is also positively associated with portfolio size but only for larger NPOs, and that the delivery of collaboration options is negatively associated with portfolio size. We discuss these findings in relation to their implications for research and practice.