Equity Focused. Data Driven. Human Centered.

Often, we can identify the symptoms of poverty and poor health in our community but it can be much harder to quantify how we’re organized to treat those symptoms in a systematic way. CFC’s efforts around the Healthy NC 2030 indicators will help identify and quantify the symptoms. Our collaboration with UNCW’s Center for Social impact on mapping the nonprofit sector will support leaders and community members in identifying, scaling, and implementing collaborative efforts to address those symptoms. This asset based mapping is a critical step in building a better tomorrow for all citizens in the Cape Fear Region.

About The Study

Researchers and students from UNCW’s Center for Social Impact are collaborating with Cape Fear Collective to learn more about the nonprofit sector in New Hanover County.

We are currently conducting interviews with nonprofit managers in our region and collecting information about each entity’s funding and communication flows, and their collaborative programmatic engagements. We’re also learning what organizational outcomes they track and what type of support they require. Combining this information with publicly-available federal and state data will allow us to identify inefficiencies in the local service-delivery market, areas of duplication, gaps in service provision, and viable avenues for productive collaboration. Policymakers and nonprofit practitioners can also use these insights to inform their decision making and program design.

We’ve interviewed 56 organizations so far, and we’re hoping to reach hundreds more nonprofits and other organizations that provide them with financial support, programmatic resources, and volunteer labor. Our goal with this research is to help local nonprofits, for-profits, and government organizations create a shared understanding of the community’s assets and deficiencies, make collective decisions that produce mutual benefit, and align programming in pursuit of a healthier and more equitable community for all Cape Fear residents.

If you’re a nonprofit manager or sit on a board of directors and want to join us in this effort, then please click here to select a 30-minute window that works best for you in the months of February and March.

FAQs

How do we conduct the interview?
Interviews are conducted over Zoom and data will be collected via Qualtrics (a popular and secure survey tool).
What kinds of questions do you ask in the interview? Are they sensitive in nature?
The interview questions are general and we do not elicit any “sensitive” information. Given the nature of the analyses we’re doing it’s likely that every organization (whether or not they participate in the survey) will appear in the maps as a consequence of what others they interact with are telling us. No interviewee has declined to answer a question and participation in the survey is strong so far.
How do you plan to secure and analyze the data?
Interviews are being conducted by the research team and answers are concurrently keyed into Qualtrics. Once we have a sufficient number of responses, we plan to construct a series of social network maps containing interactions – communication, funding, and collaboration – among community organizations. We’re mapping our arts, health, education, human, social, and other service domains in an effort to understand how the ecosystem operates and ultimately produce insights that can help these nonprofits garner more resources/support. To do that, we need to know what nonprofits need and who’s doing what with whom. The underlying data will not be publicly available, but all of the maps will be made publicly available on UNCW’s Center for Social Impact website and Cape Fear Collective’s website.
Will you share your findings?
Yes. This network analysis will be accessible to all nonprofit, education, and government agencies in the greater Cape Fear Region on UNCW’s Center for Social Impact website and Cape Fear Collective’s website.
Are you offering incentives to complete the survey?
We are not offering compensation for completing the interview, but we do understand and appreciate how valuable your time is. We hope that you and others we’re contacting may be able to participate in the absence of an incentive. We ask for 30 minutes of your time, but interviews typically only run about 20 minutes. Insights gained through this project are motivated by a desire to support the nonprofits in our region and the broader community. Academic insights are secondary.
Who is on the research team?
Dr. Chris Prentice, Director of UNCW’s Center for Social Impact
Dr. Anup Phayal, Assistant Professor, UNCW’s Department of Public & International Affairs
Dr. Mark Imperial, Professor, UNCW’s Department of Public & International Affairs
Brandon Hawkins, Research Assistant
Margaret Peth, UNCW MPA student
Tom Gomes, UNCW MPA student
Who can I contact with questions?
For more information on this research, please contact us at csi@uncw.edu or data@capefearcollective.org