Web-based disclosure for NPOs’ accountability

The growing attention for NPO governance emphasises an increasing interest in performance measurement, as well as the importance of responsible behaviour based on transparency in disclosure and stakeholder relations. Indeed, a responsible conduct towards all internal and external stakeholders and the transparency of information are pre-conditions of proper governance and dominant qualities of all the activities carried out by NPOs. NPO governance depends on multiple factors, such as the organisation’s legal form, the aims it pursues and the availability of resources, and it should be improved in line with several recent recommendations concerning external disclosure. In the Italian context, the most important guidelines on NPOs’ disclosure were published by CNDCEC (the Italian national council of chartered accountants) and the third sector organisations’ Agency, whose functions are currently performed by the Ministry of Labour and Social Policies. More exactly, CNDCEC issued a recommended scheme for NPOs’ financial and social report in 2002, while the Agency published its guidelines on NPOs’ annual report and social report in 2009 and 2011 respectively. Moreover, the joint activity of CNDCEC and the Agency led to the issue of the accounting standards No. 1 and 2 for NPOs in May 2011 and February 2012 respectively. In time, further impulse to the social reporting debate has been due to the contribution of GBS (Gruppo di studio per il Bilancio Sociale, an Italian association that promotes research activities concerning social reporting), the Italian Ministry of Labour and Social Policies with its CSR-SC project, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and AccountAbility1000. The variegated nature of NPOs stresses the key role of financial, social and environmental integrated disclosure for the promotion of trust-based relationships and the acquisition of stakeholders’ long-time approval on NPOs’ operations for the best benefit of the society. Compatibly with limited availability of resources, every NPO should create its own website, through which to divulge transparent information concerning its governance, the money invested and the performances reached in the interests of the stakeholders, also considering the environmental impact of operations and the future sustainability in the light of decreasing public funds and the evolution of the global context. This paper is part of a research activity that started in 2003 and consisted in analysing the effectiveness of the financial and social disclosure divulged by a sample of NPOs through the Internet. The paper aims at highlighting to what extent the Internet is used by NPOs as a means of communication with their stakeholders and what its limits are. Furthermore, we intend to identify and evaluate the quality of NPOs’ financial and social disclosure, the evolutionary trends underway and their dependence from existent guidelines and standards, the connection between formal and substantial responsibility, but also how NPOs’ disclosure should be improved in order to optimise internal and external relations. In this regard, social accounting practices and mechanisms of accountability can be useful to assess NPOs’ social responsible conducts and interaction with the stakeholders. The research adopts an empirical/inductive approach and it consists in a content analysis of selected NPOs’ websites in order to evaluate the effectiveness of online social reporting. The item selection considers essential requirements and key performance indicators of social responsibility, which have been proposed in the existent guidelines and standards of social reporting, as well as in the most recent business literature on accountability