1 Accountability Online: The Web as an Accountability-Building Tool for Nonprofit Organizations

Nonprofit organizations ’ responsibility to the larger public interest has resulted in calls for greater transparency, oversight, and accountability. We posit that the Internet carries tremendous potential for permitting nonprofit organizations to respond to this accountability challenge and bolster the public’s trust in their activities. In this paper we explore the prevalence of the use of the Internet as a tool to enhance organizational accountability along three key dimensions— finances, performance, and participation—through an examination of the content of 117 diverse community foundation websites. We further examine the organizational and contextual determinants of web-based accountability tools along these three dimensions. The study carries significant potential to inform both the academic and practitioner literatures on how to successfully utilize Internet-based technologies to achieve a truly accountable organization. Keywords