Identifying how U.S. nonprofit organizations operate within the Information Process Maturity Model Sarah K. Gunning, Ph.D. Towson University 8000 York Road, CLA 5305 Towson, MD 21252 +1 (410) 704-3139 sgunning@towson.edu ABSTRACT In this paper, the researcher investigates grant writers’ perspectives on knowledge management practices within nonprofit organizations. The researcher uses survey data (n = 448) to assess where organizations fall within JoAnn Hackos’s Information Process Maturity Model (IPMM) [1]. The paper asks, how do proposal writers perceive current documentation efforts within their organizations? Is there a relationship between an organization’s annual operating budget and employees’ satisfaction with documentation efforts? Results indicate that most nonprofit organizations fall within the Ad hoc or Rudimentary stage of the IPMM. However, this classification may be due to grant writers’ preferences to create individual rather than organizational documentation systems. Organizational documentation practices have both short- and long-term economic implications for the nonprofit industry, particularly fundraising, where employee turnover is a problem. Categories and Subject Descriptors Documentation, Management, Research, Survey, Interviews General Terms Management, Documentation, Performance, Design, Economics, Reliability, Standardization. Keywords Proposal writers, documentation, knowledge management, nonprofit, procedures, institutional memory, research. 1. INTRODUCTION The role of many U.S. nonprofit organizations is to fill gaps among federally funded social services. Recently, government agencies have criticized the nonprofit sector for duplicating services provided by other organizations or failing to identify best practices found in communities serving similar populations. As a result, it is difficult for nonprofit organizations to effectively leverage grant dollars [2, 3]. As of 2000, the nonprofit industry accounts for as much as 10 percent of all U.S. employment and as much as nine percent of the domestic economy [4]. Over the past 20 years, knowledge management (KM)—how organizations manage and share information among employees—has become a popular area of study in corporations [5, 6, 7, 8; many others]. However, nonprofit KM has received little attention [10, 11, 12]. 1.1 Nonprofit organizations’ knowledge management practices: often “silos” We know that knowledge management (KM) systems are common in nonprofit organizations, but little about how employees use the systems. In 2005, 82% of the organizations surveyed have some sort of system in place [12]. Although a majority of the organizations have KM systems, nonprofits have a tendency to maintain a majority of knowledge in implicit (non- recorded) form [9]. As commonly echoed in KM literature, the knowledge capital within nonprofits is “heterogeneous, widespread, rarely formalized, and unstable due to considerable turnover rates among workers” [3], particularly grant writing professionals [4]. Several studies show that nonprofits have a tendency to maintain implicit knowledge, sharing through personal contact and informal discussion, even when the information could be codified [3, 11, 12]. Other studies indicate that organizations are beginning to recognize the value of codifying information so that it is accessible to more individuals [11, 12]. The bodies of implicit programmatic knowledge are often divided among multiple individuals, making the information less accessible to others. This is often referred to as the “silo effect” [8, 11, 13]. Fragmentation of institutional knowledge reduces the potential effectiveness of actions, wastes money, and reduces the potential for cross-fertilization among ideas and solutions [3]. The organization’s risk of knowledge loss is directly proportional to the knowledge held at the individual level. This is of particular importance to employees who rely on this information to perform their job duties, such as proposal writers [2]. This loss can be disastrous for nonprofits, which rely on grant money and donations to fund their programs. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org SIGDOC ‘14, September 27–28, 2014, Colorado Springs, CO, U.S.A. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3183-8/14/09 $15.00.