Mark Hager

Arizona State University, School of Community Resources and Development, Faculty Member

Followers

550

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

http://www.mhager.net/

Mark A. Hager is Associate Professor of Nonprofit Studies in the School of Community Resources & Development at Arizona State University, where he serves as director of graduate studies for the nonprofit degree programs. He is editor-in-chief of Nonprofit Management & Leadership. He was formerly Senior Research Associate in the Center for Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute.

His research includes studies of the scope, dimensions, administration, and financial operations of and reporting by nonprofit organizations. Hager earned his Ph.D. in organizational sociology at the University of Minnesota with a study of the causes of nonprofit organization closure. In addition to book chapters, research reports, and professional presentations, his work on the behavior of nonprofit organizations has appeared in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management & Leadership, Public Administration Review, , Public Management Review, the Journal of Volunteer Administration, Nonprofit Quarterly, and the American Behavioral Scientist.

He is a member of the ASU graduate faculty in the School of Community Resources & Development, the School of Social Work and the sociology programs in the School of Social and Family Dynamics.

less

InterestsView All (7)

Uploads

Papers by Mark Hager

Help Your Nonprofit Clients Improve Their Accounting for Capital and In-Kind Donations

by Kennard Wing and Mark Hager

Help Your Nonprofit Clients Improve Their Accounting for Capital and In-Kind Donations Kennard Wi... more Help Your Nonprofit Clients Improve Their Accounting for Capital and In-Kind Donations Kennard Wing, Teresa Gordon, Mark Hager, Tom Pollak and Patrick Rooney Opening factoid: American individuals, estates, foundations and corporations gave an estimated $240.72 billion to charitable causes in 2003, up from $234.09 billion in 2002. Source: Giving USA 2004 Many nonprofit organizations, especially smaller ones, lack skilled financial professionals either on staff or on the board. Auditors and other external CPAs are in an excellent position to help these clients present their financial results in ways that will avoid misunderstanding and confusion on the part of financial statement users both inside and outside the client organization. Two areas that have created special problems for nonprofits are accounting for large capital donations and for in-kind donations. We’ll look at the problems first; then show you accounting solutions you can bring to your clients.

Download

The pros and cons of financial efficiency standards

by Ted Flack and Mark Hager

Form 990, the reporting document required by the Internal Revenue Service for public charities wi... more Form 990, the reporting document required by the Internal Revenue Service for public charities with at least $25,000 in gross receipts, has a roughly 60 year history. It was first required in the early 1940s, became a uniform reporting document for all states in the 1980s, and became widely available to donors via the World Wide Web in the late 1990s. Since nonprofit organizations are not legally obligated to divulge audited financial statements to the public, Form 990 is the only publicly available document that reports on the finances of the majority of nonprofit ...

Functional expense reporting for nonprofits: The profession��s next scandal?

by Mark Hager, Teresa Gordon, and Kennard Wing

CPA Journal, 2006

Publicly ti-ddcd companies' audited financial statements arc public documents, while the tax... more Publicly ti-ddcd companies' audited financial statements arc public documents, while the tax retum is a piivatc matter between the corporation and the IRS. For nonprofits. the opposite is the case. A nonprofit's Foim 990 is a public dcx'umenl. Nearly 2.4 million that have been imaged by the IRS are available online at www. guidestar. org. In contrast, nonprofits' audited financial statements are required to be released by only a minority of states" charity registration offices. authors included two such organizations in a set of nine in-dcpth case ...

Who Raises Contributions for America's Nonprofit Organizations?

Many nonprofit organizations provide services that are public goods. These goods, such as child m... more Many nonprofit organizations provide services that are public goods. These goods, such as child mentoring, environmental protection, and the performing arts, benefit a large number of people and improve our quality of life. However, these kinds of goods usually do not generate enough income to make them self-sustaining. Consequently, most of these organizations rely to some extent on some form of public support, including donations from individuals or businesses and grants from foundations or government. Public support represents about one in every five ...

Download

How Nonprofits Close: A Qualitative Study of 31 Twin Cities Nonprofit Organizations

�� , �� . ...

University Arts Programs and Local Communities: A Report on a Pilot Study

The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 2000

Given the diversity of higher education institutions in the United States, it is likely that the ... more Given the diversity of higher education institutions in the United States, it is likely that the number and type of fine arts programs3 and the amount of community participation vary among universities. However, systematic study of the nature and variation of programs and participation can be difficult since these activities are embedded within institutions. That is, rather than operating as independent organizations, university-based arts programs function as part of their larger institutions. In the current study we develop and test a framework that ...

Download

Book Review: Arts Marketing Insights: The Dynamics of Building and Retaining Performing Arts Audiences, by Joanne Scheff Bernstein. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. 294 pp. $27.95 (hardcover)

Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 2007

370 Book Reviews their careers trying to reproduce their day in the sun.(Orson Welles.) Every fie... more 370 Book Reviews their careers trying to reproduce their day in the sun.(Orson Welles.) Every field has examples, I suppose.(Peter Frampton.) The creative or physical talents of youth can be a mixed blessing, pushing someone into the spotlight and then forever using that spotlight on the warts and wrinkles of later works.(Ken Griffey, Jr.) Maybe there are even cases of this in the field of performing arts marketing.(Joanne Scheff Bernstein.) In 1997, as Joanne Scheff, Bernstein partnered with marketing guru Philip

Download

Performing Arts Research Coalition Community Report: Pittsburgh

Performing Arts Research Coalition Community Report: Austin

Lessons for boards from the Nonprofit Overhead Cost Project

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of ... more The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. ... Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF). ... Many nonprofit organizations have problems accurately tracking and reporting their overhead expenditures in financial statements. Is your organization one of them? ... This guide is based on information collected by the Nonprofit Overhead ...

Download

Measuring volunteerism: The Current Population Survey and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics

Annual Meeting of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, Atlanta, Georgia, Nov 15, 2007

Special issues in nonprofit financial reporting: A guide for financial professionals

The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of ... more The nonpartisan Urban Institute publishes studies, reports, and books on timely topics worthy of public consideration. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. ... Note: This report is available in its entirety in the Portable Document Format (PDF). ... Nonprofit managers and their donors rely on functional expense reporting for both management and giving decisions. However, many nonprofit organizations misreport these expenses. ... This guide is based on information collected by the ...

Organizational slack in nonprofits

Academy of Management at Honolulu, Hawaii, 2005

A distinguishing feature of nonprofit organizations is their complex revenue structure, which may... more A distinguishing feature of nonprofit organizations is their complex revenue structure, which may include a significant amount of revenue in the form of grants, gifts and investment revenue. An organization with investment income can spend it any way it chooses without having an adverse effect on generating future revenues from this source. Incentives for cost control are weak. This raises the possibility that investment income creates organizational slack. The concept of organizational slack has been well-studied in for-profit firms, but hardly at all in nonprofit organizations. We hypothesize that investment revenue creates organizational slack, which is defined three ways: (1) available slack or liquidity, (2) recoverable slack or overhead or non-essential costs and (3) potential slack or solvency. Controlling for financial health, organization size, fixed costs, and sub-sector, the regression results reveal slope coefficients with the expected signs and highly significant t-values. The financial health of a nonprofit plays an important role in determining its willingness to convert use investment revenues to build organizational slack. Cash-strapped organizations are as willing as healthier nonprofits to increase officers' compensation, enhance their unused borrowing capacity at somewhat slower pace than other firms but avoid growing overhead costs. Unprofitable nonprofits behave much like the full sample although they are less quick to expand their future borrowing ability. Overall, human services providers develop less organizational slack of all forms, health-oriented nonprofits accumulate relatively less available and potential slack, while arts organizations create relatively high recoverable slack.

Download

Variations in overhead and fundraising efficiency measures: The influence of size, age, and subsector

annual conference of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, Miami, FL, 2001

The desire of individual donors and institutional funders to know how their money is spent, along... more The desire of individual donors and institutional funders to know how their money is spent, along with the increasing availability of financial information on nonprofit organizations, has increased the use and abuse of financial measures of nonprofit efficiency. We focus on two measures: the proportion of budget spent on non-program expenses and the ratio of fundraising expenses to contributions. We hypothesize variations in these measures by organizational size, age, and subsector, and we test these hypotheses with data reported ...

Download

Institutional Trust, Sector Confidence, and Charitable Giving

Trust influences charitable-giving behavior. However, prevailing theoretical discussion and empir... more Trust influences charitable-giving behavior. However, prevailing theoretical discussion and empirical study of the effects of trust suffer from confusion over different dimensions of trust. In addition to the distinction between particularistic trust in individual organizations and generalized trust in unknown others, we differentiate generalized trust in strangers, institutions, and charitable organizations writ large. An empirical analysis concentrates on the latter two, finding that charitable confidence directly influences charitable giving while institutional trust does not. We assert that the influence of charitable confidence on giving may help explain how individuals previously unaware of particular organizations or brands may be susceptible to cold calls and solicitations.

Download