Entrepreneurial activities of public benefit organizations

Abstract

The paper assesses how revenue diversification of the public benefit organizations (which are important part of the polish third sector) is associated with the organizations size (measured by the total year revenues). The study covered all public benefit organizations (it was almost 8,000 organizations-their number varied depending on the year), which operated in 2015-2017. The results obtained indicate that there is a statistically significant relationship between the diversification of revenues and the size of the organization. The analysis included, in particular, commercial sources of revenues, which prove the pro-entrepreneurial attitude of the surveyed organizations and the ability to operate on a competitive market. Results also indicate that revenue diversification through the use of commercial earning sources has a positive effect on the overall volume of annual revenue generated. It can therefore be concluded that the diversification of revenue sources is better for Polish public benefit organizations (PBOs) than concentration on one source. Univariate descriptive statistics associated with frequency distributions, including percentages and means, and statistical tests (including the chi-square independence tests and Kruskal – Wallis tests) were used to verify the hypotheses.