Know Me Before You Speak for Me: Substantive Public Representation Among Nonprofits

AbstractNonprofit and public administration scholars have increasingly turned attention to the wide variety of channels by which nonprofit organizations may influence public policy, raising critical questions about nonprofit representation. While recent years have brought important work about the extent to which nonprofits are perceived as symbolic representatives of their clients, scholars repeatedly note substantive representationremains understudied. This article seeks to address that gap by offering a conceptual framework of potential nonprofit substantive representationmechanisms. Two categories of mechanisms emerged from a scan of scholarly and practitioner literature—client engagement and client assessment, while an exploratory case study of one nonprofit’s explicit endeavor to improve substantive representationsurfaced a third category—immersion. We offer this framework as a useful first step in organizing and presenting mechanisms for consideration, and to encourage future exploration and test...