Predicting Mission Alignment and Preventing Mission Drift: How Revenue Sources Matter?

Abstract

Activities of nonprofit organizations do not always align with their missions, a managerial problem termed as “mission drift.” Mission drift is difficult to operationalize and quantify thus, as a critical issue, only a few conceptual pieces or empirical case studies explored this topic. This paper develops innovative measures to operationalize “mission alignment” using data science methodology and examines how different revenue sources influence the mission alignment of Chinese foundations. Specifically, four measures of mission alignment are devised based on the cosine similarity of text between mission statement and program description (i.e., the sum cosine similarity, average cosine similarity, weighted sum cosine similarity, and weighted average cosine similarity). The text analysis of programs indicates that the majority of the foundations’ projects have educational purposes and for-profit businesses play a significant role in foundations’ projects and funding. The regression analysis shows that personal donation and service revenue can increase mission alignment while organizational donation and membership dues decrease mission alignment. The results suggest validity of the mission alignment measures.