8. Creating Public Value Through Nonprofit Involvement in Service Delivery: The Case of Veterans Services

More than half of these organizations report little to no revenues on their federal form 990, meaning they are mostly or wholly voluntary, run by volunteers rather than a paid staff. Examples of these types of nonprofits include local chapters of federated fraternal organizations designed to connect military service members such as American Legion posts, Veterans of Foreign Wars chapters. There are thousands of local chapters of these groups represented in the total count of W30 organizations; most do not provide social services but instead operate as “social clubs” for veterans.

While there are a vast number of veteran-serving charities coded “W30” registered with the IRS, we applied a number of filters that ultimately pared the number of organizations we surveyed to a small number. As indicated above, many of these organized post 0 revenues and are largely voluntary. We established a minimum threshold of $100,000 in annual revenues to be surveyed, and three consistent years of filed form 990. Organizations also needed to have an email address attributed to a name (the Executive Director, Board Chair, etc. rather than a generic info@ address), and the organization needed to have a working website. We further narrowed our list to organizations that had an independent rating in Charity Navigator or GuideStar. We ultimately surveyed 410 organizations for a total response of 17%.