The Tangled Web of Policy Support: Foundations and Environmental NGOs

It has long been recognized that foundation support is a crucial element for NGOs, particularly for those championing the environment. However, exactly how foundations and NGOs match, or whether NGOs tailor their organizations to appeal to foundations, has been understudied. We address these issues by compiling a dataset of foundation support of environmental NGOs and specifying a statistical model of donating using Item Response Theory. Estimating this model using Correspondence Analysis, we find two key spatial dimension—ideology and focus—and evidence consistent with the idea that environmental NGOs moving in space to accommodate foundations do better