Ohio State University Scholars Garner Prestigious ARNOVA Research Accolades

Ali and Tran are recipients of the 2025 Felice Davidson Perlmutter Award conferred by ARNOVA’s Theory, Issues, Boundaries Section (TIBS) for their research “Community Foundations’ Racialized Framing and Donor Solicitation: Theory and Experimental Evidence.”

This award acknowledges nascent research demonstrating substantial promise for advancing nonprofit theory, addressing critical issues and crossing disciplinary boundaries.

“Receiving this award is truly meaningful,” said Ali. “By integrating theories across disciplines, this project advances novel theoretical and empirical insights into how community foundations operate as major institutional actors addressing social and racial inequities, particularly through the unique context of donor solicitation and charitable giving.”

“Maham and I are truly honored to receive this research award,” said Tran. “Led by Maham, one of the Glenn College’s PhD candidates on the job market, this research project aims to contribute innovative theoretical insights and empirical evidence regarding the implications of an important recent phenomenon: community foundations positioning themselves as major institutional actors in addressing social and racial inequities.”

The research investigates how the stated commitments of community foundations to social and racial equity impact their donor solicitation strategies. The investigation employed a rigorous randomized experimental design, yielding the following preliminary findings: The donation intentions of non-Latino white individuals exhibited no statistically significant variation in response to the racialized organizational frames utilized by the foundations. Conversely, people of color demonstrated a statistically significant response to several racialized frames, influencing both their hypothetical and actual donation decisions.

“This award is an important honor in the field of nonprofit management research,” said Stephanie Moulton, associate dean for faculty and research at the Glenn College. “Doctoral candidate Maham Ali and Assistant Professor Long Tran are advancing nonprofit theory and practice with their paper, representing the Glenn College’s commitment to high impact scholarship that makes a difference in the real world.”

View the bios and CVs of doctoral candidate Maham Ali and Assistant Professor Long Tran. 

In addition to the Perlmutter Award, Tran has also won the 2025 ARNOVA Governance Paper Award from the Governance Section. This accolade recognizes the preeminent governance-related research papers authored during the recipient’s graduate student tenure between 2018 and 2025.

His winning paper, “International NGO Centralization and Leader-Perceived Effectiveness,” offers substantive theoretical and practical implications for international NGO governance reform.

In 2021, Glenn College Professor Megan LePere-Schloop received the ARNOVA Perlmutter Award. Her winning paper examined the nexus of public administration and nonprofit studies.