The Payoff of Lobbying: It Works Big Time for the Corporate Sector but for Nonprofits?
By Rick Cohen
The Nonprofit Quarterly
October 12, 2011
Plenty of organizations have been studying the return on investment of nonprofit lobbying, notably the series produced by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, with reports on advocacy in the Mid-South, Pennsylvania, Illinois, the Northwest, and Los Angeles. The NCRP blurbs reference a financial calculation of the benefit from nonprofit advocacy—$91 for every dollar spent on advocacy in Los Angeles, $114 for the Mid-South, $122 in Pennsylvania, and $150 in the Northwest Region.
But advocacy is a broader term that encompasses, but is not synonymous with, lobbying and lobbyists. The NCRP analysis might or might not be different were it to simply focus on nonprofit lobbying.
