The main sources of non-profit financing include donations, grants, and sales of
products and services (Yetman and Yetman, 2003). In the literature, it is quite
common to classify NPOs into ‘donative’ versus ‘commercial’ organizations,8
depending upon their main source of financing (see e.g., Hansmann 1987; Calabrese
2011; Balsam and Harris 2014; Reheul et al. 2014). Based on resource dependence
theory, the aforementioned distinction is highly relevant, because an organization’s
need for resources is argued to determine its decisions and actions (see e.g., Pfeffer
and Salancik 1978; Vermeer et al. 2009). A major difference between donative and
commercial NPOs is that donative NPOs’ resource providers (i.e., private donors
and/or governments) are generally not direct consumers of an organization’s
programs or services and are therefore unable to directly evaluate the quality of the
NPOs’ output (Saxton et al. 2011). Accordingly, FS play an important monitoring