Background

Nonprofit and voluntary organizations, an important element of Canadian society, often address needs and interests of citizens that governments and the private sector do not. Although the presence of these organizations is felt in virtually every community, they have not been studied extensively. We have little knowledge of their numbers, their contributions, or the resources they require to fulfill their missions.

The information collected by the National Survey of Nonprofit and Voluntary Organizations (NSNVO) is essential for several reasons. It will help address concerns that the potential social, economic and cultural contributions of these organizations to Canadian communities are not being fully realized and recognized. The research is a critical first step towards enabling evidence-based policy development by governments and others to strengthen nonprofit and voluntary organizations. It will also provide individual nonprofit and voluntary organizations with benchmark data against which to compare their organizations' experiences and characteristics. Last but not least, it will offer Canadians a richer understanding of the role that nonprofit and voluntary organizations play in their lives.

The NSNVO was funded by the Federal Government's Voluntary Sector Initiative. The objectives of the NSNVO are:

• to collect comprehensive information about the breadth of the nonprofit and voluntary sector in Canada , its characteristics and its areas of activity, and
• to improve our understanding of the challenges that organizations may be experiencing with respect to their capacity to achieve their missions.

The NSNVO was undertaken by a consortium of nine organizations: the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy (as the lead organization); l' Alliance de recherche universités-communautés en économie sociale, l'Université du Québec à Montréal; Canada West Foundation; Canadian Council on Social Development; Capacity Development Network, University of Victoria; Community Services Council, Newfoundland and Labrador; School of Policy Studies, Queen's University; Secretariat on Voluntary Sector Sustainability at the Manitoba Voluntary Sector Initiative; and Statistics Canada.

Qualitative research was conducted to identify issues for the survey to address and to make an initial assessment of the various strengths of nonprofit and voluntary organizations as well as the challenges they face in fulfilling their missions. This phase of the research involved a literature review and a series of focus groups and key informant interviews. Our findings showed that nonprofit and voluntary organizations believed they had many strengths, particularly the ability to tap the resources of committed volunteers and paid staff.¹ But participants also reported that they were having considerable difficulty obtaining the appropriate financial and human resources to deliver their programs and services to Canadians. These findings guided the development of the survey questionnaire for the quantitative phase of the research.

In 2003, representatives of approximately 13,000 incorporated nonprofit organizations and registered charities² were surveyed by Statistics Canada. They were asked to report on the characteristics of their organizations and the factors that influenced the capacity of their organization to achieve its mission. The data presented in this report have been weighted to provide estimates for the 161,000 incorporated nonprofit and voluntary organizations and registered charities in Canada.³

The survey provides the most comprehensive profiling of nonprofit and voluntary organizations ever undertaken in Canada and, given its scale, it may be the most comprehensive study conducted in the world. It breaks significant methodological ground by creating, for the first time, a sample frame that makes possible valid estimates of all incorporated nonprofit and voluntary organizations and registered charities in Canada.

The NSNVO provides essential baseline data about nonprofit and voluntary organizations, including

• their numbers and geographic distribution
• their areas of activity, the populations they serve and the extent to which they provide public benefits
• the financial and human resources on which they rely
• problems they report about their capacity to fulfill their missions.

It also complements information gathered by the National Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating,4 which tracks the donations and volunteer support that Canadians provide to nonprofit and voluntary organizations.

This study is intended to begin filling some of the gaps in our knowledge about nonprofit and voluntary organizations. From it, a picture emerges of a set of organizations that provide services that are critical to the quality of life in our communities. Most nonprofit and voluntary organizations are a product of the engagement of individual citizens and their voluntary contributions of time and money. In many ways they help to define who we are as Canadians.

Notes

1. See M.H. Hall et al., 2003, The Capacity to Serve: A Qualitative Study of the Challenges Facing Canada's Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector, Toronto, Canadian Centre for Philanthropy.

2. Registered charities are organizations that have obtained registered charitable status from the federal government of Canada. A more detailed description may be found in Appendix A.

3. Additional information about the methodology employed in the collection and analyses of the data is contained in Appendix B.

4. The survey is generally conducted every three years and has been renamed the Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating for future iterations.