Accessing the Boardroom: Investigating How Prior Research has Included the Perspective of Nonprofit Boards

Boards of directors hold critical oversight and governance functions for nonprofit organizations. Even though nonprofit research has stressed the importance of engaging board members in research designs, boards can be surprisingly inaccessible given their volunteer status, rotating term limits, and the protective role of an executive who serves as a gatekeeper to board contact information. For research interested in engaging directly with board members, a challenge emerges on how to access and contact board members. To help identify how prior research had overcome this challenge, a systematic literature review is used to summarize sampling parameters and data collection approaches, as well as data sources for integrating board perspectives in nonprofit research. These findings provide insights for how future research may build off these prior approaches, as well as fill in gaps so that nonprofit research designs adequately include board perspectives.